The key concept in “The Mayor’s Myth,” (Editorial, July 15) is reality.
Just because Mayor Bloomberg rides the subway to work, that does not provide him with a true picture of what’s going on in our city.
As you succinctly state, we have an enormous underground economy, which is growing as we speak. Even though we may have reduced the number of fraudulent welfare recipients, there still is a significant number of them.
To statistically pinpoint the poverty rate in our city is impossible. It would be far more prudent for our mayor to base his decisions on facts, not misleading supposition.
Carl Rosenberg
Great Neck
Bloomberg offers a new calculation of New York City’s poverty rate, which uses a higher cut-off level than the Fed’s $20,444.
You complain that the new level is set too high by saying, “No family of four could survive for a year in New York City on a total income of $26,138. Period.”
This is both ignorant and incoherent.
Steve Snow
Associate Professor of
Government & Politics
Wagner College
Staten Island
Heather Mac Donald criticizes Bloomberg’s new poverty policy, stating, “If single mothers married the fathers of their children, 60 percent would be lifted out of poverty overnight” (“Mike’s Misstep,” PostOpinion, July 15).
It’s all up to these single mothers, is it? Men are just lining up to marry them, and they say no?
It is insensitive and convenient to suggest that only fathers matter and that income doesn’t.
Garrett Eisler
Manhattan