Opinion

Lindsay’s third term

How sad that policies that do nothing to help the neediest and most vulnerable members of society are called “progressive,” even as they march us back to the kind of decisions of the 1960s and ’70s that helped devastate so many inner cities. It’s as if John Lindsay is back in Gracie Mansion.

The latest example is the de Blasio administration’s attempt to reverse one of the greatest advances in social policy in New York history: welfare reform.

In this, New York was helped along by the historic 1996 welfare-reform bill, which, as E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center reminds us, “transformed an open-ended entitlement program into a system based on work incentives.”

Under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, the city took the federal reform even further. The result was that the numbers of New Yorkers on welfare dropped by 700,000 since its peak in the mid-1990s. Think about that. That’s 700,000 lives reclaimed from dependency.

And at a huge savings to taxpayers: According to the city’s Independent Budget Office, the cost of public-assistance grants plunged to $1.4 billion this year from $4.4 billion (in 2014 dollars) in 1995. By almost any measure, this is a huge achievement.

But not to Bill de Blasio. Apparently, our mayor thinks the more welfare, the better. His new boss for the Human Resources Administration, Steve Banks, is quickly throwing out many of the requirements that made welfare reform possible. This is not surprising: Before his appointment, Banks was an activist at the Legal Aid Society, where he sued the city over its welfare requirements.

Banks has been busy. He’s made clear the city intends to count college as work, so that students can go on welfare to pay their way. He’s thrown out the provision requiring welfare recipients without children to at least look for work to receive benefits.

These are huge steps backward — for the city, for the taxpayers, for the recipients themselves.

New Yorkers are generous people. We are there for our fellow citizens in need. But the money is not unlimited, and a government that lavishes welfare dollars on the able-bodied will not have what it needs to help the truly needy.

In this sense, welfare reform was truly progressive, because it aimed to restore the social contract. Now the mayor and his Human Resources commissioner are breaking it apart.

In short, the 1960s of John Lindsay are closer than they appear.