Every "blue" city is becoming more and more like this

 

Courtesy of Borepatch, I came across this utterly ridiculous city budgeting and expenditure procedure in San Francisco.  It's worth watching if only for the comedy value - and because it's better to laugh at it than cry about it.

The problem is, all that bureaucracy and paperwork offers immense opportunities for graft and corruption.  The powers that be can simply hide their monetary peculations in the mass of documentation and required procedures, making it very difficult (if not impossible) to prove what they're up to.

Sometimes they don't even bother to hide it, because they know they'll get away with it.  The latest example comes from New York City.

Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Adams is giving out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.

. . .

This debit-card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multi-billion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.

It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.

Why give debit cards out?

When The Post exposed the mayor’s debit-card program earlier this month, the mayor’s office spun it as a money-saving program, to solve a problem: migrants staying in hotels don’t eat all their food.

. . .

It wouldn’t be that difficult for the city to solve this problem: on-site city auditors could refuse to pay for meals that are objectively inedible, with visible mold, for example, or with expired labeling.

Instead of assuring that its existing no-bid “emergency” contractor fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid “emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for waste, fraud, and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.

There's more at the link.

The article includes an analysis of why the Mayor gave the contract for administering the program to a single, new-on-the-block vendor with no competitive bidding process.  The entire affair stinks to high heaven of corruption and fraud . . . but will anything be done about it?  No.  It's just New York City politics and wheeler-dealing at work - and to hell with ratepayers' money.  (That being the case, how many migrants do you think will end up with $10K each, versus how much of that $10K will be eaten up by "expenses" or "administrative fees" or "community service costs"?  And how much will end up as donations to local politicians' "re-election campaigns"?)

Friends, this is what life is like in left-wing-dominated cities.  They're all like that.  I don't know of a single one that could be described as honest, above-board and incorrupt in its dealings.  If you do, please let us know in Comments.  (Republican-controlled cities aren't much better, of course;  they're just - usually, but not always - more careful in how they skim off the graft.)

I've said for years that you need to get out of big cities.  This is just one more reason to do so.

Peter