The MTA is bending the knee on a favorite coverage hobbyhorse of deranged progressives: free public transit.
The company is making 5 NYC bus routes free for six months beginning in September, at a cool $15 million value to taxpayers.
The initiative, coming from Albany lefties, is supposed to (within the phrases of Gov. Kathy Hochul) enhance “transit fairness.”
Fill within the “fairness” sq. in your Twitter Dem bingo card, all people!
This pilot program is clearly meant solely to be a first step.
At the identical time, word that the MTA transit board final week OK’d fares at summer time’s finish, to virtually three bucks.
What a advantageous instance of the no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch concept.
Look, this has nothing to do with fairness.
There’s already a program in place to supply low-income New Yorkers with a 50% low cost on MTA farecards.
And poor and working-class folks within the metropolis don’t want small-ball “fairness” pushes. They want secure streets, good faculties and good jobs — all hampered by lefty insurance policies on crime, public schooling and the economic system.
No, that is in regards to the apparently unconquerable left-wing conviction that each public good must be “free” (i.e. completely tax-funded, with no person charges in any respect).
Lefties insist millionaires and billionaires will pay for all this.
But the Empire State’s horrible tax local weather is already driving out our high-income earners.
And extra handouts (like free buses) finally additionally imply greater taxes on high of fare rises — which suggests extra bleeding.
The plan can also be clearly a method to take care of the MTA’s large farebeating downside (which is particularly dangerous on buses, costing $315 million in 2022) by eliminating fares as an alternative of crooks.
Can’t progressives get something proper?
