From the Mayor’s Office: Goodbye to Cookies, Reading, and Staten Island
Mayor Adams, if you can read this, please don’t take away our milk.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Hear ye, hear ye! And mourn, for Staten Island will be leaving us at the end of February. Mayor Adams has taken to his public safety scissors once again to cut down on costs, citing that “The Staten Island Fairy hasn’t learned how to fly by now, so why are we still paying for it?” Sounds intriguing, and maybe even encouraging? Read on, for we have news of other plans from the Mayor.
When deciding where to lower the budget (and people’s overall life satisfaction), he started with places frequented by two threatening groups—students and people who enjoy reading. Public schools and libraries seem, at best, superfluous. Haven’t people seen how beautiful private schools look? Why aren’t people considering them more? These are the questions our Mayor must be asking himself.
Early this year, in honor of Margaret Thatcher’s heroic milk snatching—a thrilling tale of robbery—public school lunches are saying a tearful goodbye to cookies, bean and cheese burritos, and chicken dumplings. Cutting class is one offense, but cutting the city’s school food budget by $60 billion is—maybe—a crime. We should be lucky we still have food, we are encouraged to think, but no. The majority of us will continue planning our brave stands, chaining ourselves to the stacked chairs of the lunchroom before a bulldozer arrives to take away our mozzarella sticks. Why couldn’t they have come for the ice-packed guacamole first?
Despite this “brilliant” cost-cutting maneuver by Adams to emulate the Iron Lady, the city’s debt still refused to leave the negatives. Thus, drastic measures had to be taken, and Adams moved on to the next thing: removing the libraries. “After all, we won’t have a deficit if nobody can read the budget,” announced Mayor Adams. In response, critics called this “utterly insane” and said that “nobody can read the budget, that's how we got into this mess!”
While the project is estimated to save the $400 million budget on libraries, it is questionable how much of that is being spent on the deficit and not on the multi-million dollar light shows outside Congress begging for a bailout.
This policy is not the only one to be enacted by mayoral executive order. As if struck by divine inspiration, New Yorkers can finally rest easy knowing that the emergency gates in three subway stations now open after a 15-second delay, as if in a well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to make the MTA more consistent— implementing longer wait times throughout the entire system. You show those stroller pushers, suitcase bringers, and wheelchair users, Eric Adams! The Mayor’s administration seems OMNY-scient about the right moves to make our city truly a better place but has never seemed to be able to make accurate predictions about how much the city is truly going to spend on accommodating migrants. If only there was already a public service that gave support and information to asylum seekers. Oops! That was the NYPL.
Despite multiple new schemes taking place, from the forced annexation of the New Jersey Coastline to selling Staten Island to the Dutch, the budget still looks to be running a deficit of $4 million. But in the words of our glorious mayor, “deficit spending is optimal. We just take out a loan to pay back the deficit, then take out a loan to pay for that, and we keep going!” A heartening show of optimism from someone who felt the sky was falling last November, and felt that the best line of defense against the city’s troubles was a police robot that needed to be guarded by not one, but two human police officers.
Reader, we have just received news: The mayor has just discovered that there are wealthy people in NYC. More developments to come.