Alper to the Defense

In a response to Steve Malanga’s NY Sun article that we’ve already commented on, EDC president Andrew Alper takes issue with the assertion that NYC’s economy has been stalled under the Bloomberg administration. He calls the Malanga article “completely off the mark” and “egregiously wrong.”

In the Mayor’s defense Alper claims that the City’s job growth is outpacing the national average with the outerboroughs contributing “more than 60% of the City’s job growth last year. Alper concludes by claiming that the mayor’s “five borough economic development strategy is working.”

Malanga’s response is to point out that Alper’s claim that all five boroughs experiences “significant job growth” is “patently absurd” since in total, the City’s job rolls grew by less than .03% last year, a gain of only 10,000 jobs (out of 3,541,700 jobs in total). On the contrary, according to Malanga, the national rate of job growth is triple NYC’s and to claim that the outerboroughs are contributing 60% of the City’s job growth demonstrates very little when the aggregate growth rate is so puny.

As far as egregious is concerned, it is the Billionaire Boys with the monopoly patent. The Mayor’s commercials, which we have critiqued vis-à-vis exaggerated small business claims, assert that Bloomberg’s administration has created 62,000 new jobs when the 10,000 that were created last year was the first time in the past 3 years that we experienced any job growth at all.

Clearly, with millions to burn on election year disinformation, the Mayor believes that he can get away with Chico Marx’s response to being caught in bed with someone else’s wife. He simply looked at the poor cuckold and said: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?”

10,000 Small Businesses Added

On the small business side, the Mayor’s “five borough economic development plan” claims to have aided 10,000 small businesses. Talk about patently absurd and egregious. We are not going to reiterate our earlier posts on the subject but feel it necessary to simply say: What a crock!