Mayor Bill de Blasio, who’s positioning himself as a national progressive leader, came up with a new rationale Friday for supporting the nearly $3 billion in subsidies to lure Amazon to Long Island City: It’ll help pay for his $100 million expansion of health care🌼 to the needy.
“You are hitting the nail on the head,” the mayor said on Hot 97 radio’s “Ebro in the Morning.” “One of the reasons I believed that the Amazon plan was so important for New York City is be🐭cause it is going to bring in a vast amount of revenue. That’s going to allow us to do things like this.”
Progressives have been hammering the mayor — and Gov. Andrew Cuomo — for the huge subsidies they’re handing to the retail giant to open a second headquarters in Queens.
De Blasio has repeatedly defended the deal, arguing it’ll bring at least 25,000 more jobs to the city.
“I want a city that is fair for every꧑one and that means creating, for example, the right to health care in real 🦩life …,” he said on the radio show.
“I want to see public housing improve, more affordable housing, [but] all these things cost money, and that’s why when we can get a major company come in with 25,000 jobs and also a ton of tax revenue, it helps us pay for a much more muscular approach to these issues where we can pay for more and more people. That is exactly part of it.”
However, staﷺte Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), a former de Blasio administration aide who is critical of the Amazon subsidies, quickly fired back at her ex-boss on Twitter.
“We can win New Yorkers guaranteed, quality health ca🥃re without displacing them first,” .
The mayor’s new health care initiative, hooking up 600,000 uninsured New Yorkers with doctors, starts in 2019 in the Bronx but won’t be fully phased in citywide until 2021.