August, 2019, Part 2, By The Numbers: Wasting Billions In Baltimore and New York

On a periodic basis we do some posts that fall under the theme of “by the numbers.” Rather than trust what the American political tells us about reality, we like to examine the real numbers and the real reality in the world to understand what is actually going on. Relying on politicians, and their cohorts in the media, to tell us what is reality is always a sucker bet. They have their own agendas and goals, usually centering around their needs and self-enrichment. So we need to look at the reality of the numbers to determine what is really going on.

Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above. We will do a few “by the numbers” posts this month where we look at the numbers to truly find out how good, not likely, or bad, most likely, the American political class is doing in managing our tax dollars, protecting our freedoms, and resolving major issues that affect all of us. 

1) According to a recent article on the Conservative and Free website, the Federal agency, Housing and Urban Development, is curious as to where billions of Federal taxpayer dollars were spent, or wasted:

• $15.7 billion from the Federal government has been sent to the city of Baltimore over the past two years.
• But despite this grant and the other billions and billions that have been given to the city over time, it still has a poverty rate of about 24%, 60% higher than the national poverty level.
• If that $15.7 billion had been given directly to every Baltimore resident, each person would have received over $25,000, a family of four would have gotten $100,000.
• Obviously, given the poverty situation, that money really never made it down to those living in the city, so what happened?
• The murder rate in Baltimore is 56 murders per 100,000 residents compared to El Salvador’s 50, Guatemala’s 22 and Honduras’ 38.
• Thus, the murder rate in the city is higher than the murder rate in third world countries.
• And while Chicago gets more press for its number of murders every year, at 24 murders per 100,000 residents, it is less than half of what Baltimore’s rate is.
• Every week, 6 people on average are murdered in the city.

So while the city’s Congressman is busy berating hard working border patrol agents thousands of miles away, the people he represents are not getting the benefit of the billions and billions of dollars that have flowed from the Federal government to Baltimore. And the numbers show they continue to live in a violent and poor city. The numbers do not lie.

2) According to the Godfather Politics website, the Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio and his wife, may actually be worse at financial management than the wasteful spending of Baltimore politicians:

• Alicia F. Luke wrote back in March that the Mayor’s wife cannot account for the $850 million she was given by her husband for a city mental health project.
• His wife, Chirlane McCray, runs the ThriveNYC mental health program.
• After three years, the organization failed to keep records of it spending and has badly missed its objectives and targets.
• ThriveNYC claims it has 417 metrics but fails to track many of these metrics.
• One metric called for the program to work with 29 hospitals to serve 78,000 mothers with postnatal depression every year.
• But over the past two years, only 28,000 patients were screened, only 35% of objective, and worse yet, only 570 patients were actually offered help.
• The expectation that between 12,000 and 15,000 were supposed to be offered help, meaning that the program achieved only between 3.8% and 4.7% of its objective.

A lot of money for very little return. And worse, no one knows where the money went since the Mayor’s wife and her cohorts have lousy record keeping skills and/or intent, leading one to assume the worse: the money was a front for fraud and the stealing of taxpayer wealth.

3) But the numbers show that de Blasio’s wife is not the only family member that can waste, lose, and screw up when it comes to taxpayer money. Consider the failure and related numbers of one of his own doomed projects:

• Apparently de Blasio was high on a program called Renewal which was supposed to boost the performance of some of NYC’s lower performing schools.
• The program has failed miserably at a cost of $773 million.
• As a result of the failure, it is being shut down.
• Since many of the lower performing schools were not helped, the city and the Mayor will now just shut down 100 of the failing city schools.
• Let’s play with some numbers, starting with the reality that there are 1,700 public schools in NYC.
• Rather than have the Mayor and his minions administer, and waste, $773 million, for no measurable positive return, would if that money had simply been disbursed to the worst performing 20% of the 1,700 schools?
• That means the 340 lowest performing schools would have gotten a cash infusion of just under $2.3 million EACH.
• Best Buy currently has a nice HP 14” laptop computer for sale which means that each low performing school, if they had gotten that money directly, would be able to purchase just 7,500 computers for EACH school, obviously much more than they would need to give each kid in their school a new laptop for educational purposes.
• In fact, given that there are about 1.1 million public school kids in NYC, EVERY student in EVERY school could have been bought TWO of these HP laptops and had money to spare.
• Let’s look at it another way: it appears that the starting salary for a new teacher in NYC schools earns about $60,000.
• This means that the $773 million that the Mayor’s program wasted could have theoretically been used to hire almost 13,000 new teachers for a year.
• Rather than hiring 13,000 for a year, we could theoretically hire 2,600 new teachers and pay them for five years with this wasted $773 million.
• If we took these 2,600 new teachers and spread across the worse schools, each school would have another 7-8 teachers on staff to help turn around these poorly performing schools.
• Instead, there are no new computers and no new teachers, the NYC education process is not any better, and the city taxpayers are out $773 million.

Look, I know the computer numbers and teacher numbers estimated above only exist in a perfect world. But just magnitude of these estimates are large enough to show how much more good could have been done with the straight hiring of new teachers and the purchasing of new computers for NYC kids getting a less than stellar education vs. letting politicians and bureaucrats like de Blasio and his minions handle the money.

So, between husband and wife, the de Blasio family has spent or skimmed over $1.5 billion off of the city’s tax coffers with really nothing to show for it. Nice work if you can get it, the numbers do not lie.

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