In other news from Camp Cuomo, the governor last week moved to ban fingerprinting of food-stamp applicants — a direct slap at the Bloomberg administration and a symbolically significant rollback of a hard-won welfare reform.
How ironic that — at the precise moment that Pedro Espada stands convicted in federal court and the state moves to shut down his corrupted Soundview enterprise — Cuomo gives the disgraced former senator a final victory.
Weird but true.
Espada was Albany’s biggest proponent of ending fingerprinting, sponsoring a 2010 bill that died in committee.
As well it should have.
That’s because fingerprinting — actually, electronic fingertip-imaging — has been proven to discourage welfare fraud.
When then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani implemented such a program for the city’s public-assistance programs nearly two decades ago, tens of thousands of phantom welfare recipients simply vanished into the ether.
It was a wildly controversial move at the time — but well worth the effort.
Not that cheats aren’t still trying.
City statistics from 2010 show that 1,900 duplicate food stamp cases were identified thanks to finger-imaging, saving some $5.3 million.
The Cuomo administration says it has a new, less costly method to crack down on potential food-stamp fraud — one without the “stigma” of finger-imaging.
The new system was supposedly made official in April. Alas, the first city officials heard about it was in the governor’s announcement — Thursday.
As for stigmas — well, no reasonable person would deny the hungry food, but the absence of any social sanction whatsoever to go with it only encourages dependency.
And make no mistake about this: The next target will be meaningful ID requirements for the full range of welfare benefits.
Indeed, it already is.
“Now Mr. Cuomo needs to push legislators to end fingerprinting for welfare applicants,” intoned The New York Times on Friday — and so the beat begins.
So let’s be clear: Roughly one in three New Yorkers already receives welfare benefits of one type or another. It’s a complex web, and the bill is shared by Washington, Albany and local governments.
But a 30-percent-plus dependency rate over time becomes socially toxic. It is not to be encouraged.
The last thing Cuomo & Co. should be doing is clearing the way for people who have no right to benefits in the first place.
Does the governor want to be on the same side as Pedro Espada on this issue?
We doubt it.