NYC has One Third of US Cases and Getting Less Than 1% of the Money: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio on Stimulus Bill

During NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s COVID-19 briefing he responded to the latest information on the Stimulus Bill, but first he detailed New York City’s standing in as far as the number of Coronavirus cases were concerned. As of the morning of March 25 there were 17,856 cases in NYC making up 54% of the State’s total and 32 percent of those cases within America. The death toll was at nearly 200.

Mayor de Blasio:

“…we know, everyone in the country knows New York City is the epicenter of this crisis. Therefore, the state government, the city government in New York need all the help they can get to keep helping everyday people and to keep afloat everything else that we do. We need every other service of government to work, police and fire, and water, and sanitation, all the things we do. And that gets harder and harder if you have less and less money. So, it should have been one of the easiest no-brainers in the world for the U.S. Senate to include real money for New York City and New York state, in this stimulus bill, and yet it didn’t happen. And we know why, because Mitch McConnell wouldn’t let it happen.  I don’t understand how anybody, any public servant could live with themselves if they deprived the cities in the middle of the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, deprived us, deprived our state, of the money we need, giving New York City $1 billion out of $150 billion pool that they provide for the entire Country. But we are one-third of the cases in this country right now, someone do the math down there in Washington, in the Senate, Republican majority, someone do the math. They gave us less than 1 percent of the money that they were giving out to cities and states, and we have a third of the cases in the Nation – that is just immoral.”

“I’m going to call President Trump. I’ve spoken to President Trump several times about the stimulus bill, about what it means to New York City. I’m going to call President Trump and appeal to him – to intervene or to either fix this bill as it is or to guarantee that there will be another stimulus bill in the coming weeks that will address this problem immediately. I reached out today to Senator Schumer, I reached out to Speaker Pelosi, spoke with both of them and I want to thank them because we all know they were the lead negotiators in achieving all the good in this legislation. The direct money that will be provided to families in need to working people who have lost their jobs, those extended employment benefits, the grants to small businesses. Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi made a priority of helping the American people and helping the people in New York City who are suffering and only because of their presence do those items end up in the legislation. I say thank you to them, but I know where the roadblock is on the money, we need to keep this City and the State going. I know it’s Mitch McConnell and I’m going to appeal to President Trump who’s from this city, who understands very personally just what’s at stake here.”

Corresponding video of the March 25, 2020 COVID-19 Emergency Response Press Conference (courtesy of the Office of the Mayor of New York):