GEOFFREY COBB | gcobb91839@Aol.com
Author, “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past
I read Robert Hornak’s frankly disturbing piece about Social Welfare spending in New York City. He makes a spurious claim that he does not in any way adequately prove: New York City’s social welfare spending is creating poverty, not alleviating it. When I finished Mr. Hornak’s article, I was not surprised to learn that he is the former Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party because his piece is less a serious discussion of poverty in New York City than a thinly veiled attack on New York Democrats.
Mr. Hornak correctly points out that New York City spends more per capita than anywhere else in the nation, yet he fails to mention what is obvious to anyone who lives in New York City: it is the most expensive place in the country to live, so New York has to spend more to help its impoverished citizens. He makes the dubious and unsubstantiated claim that New York City is involved in malfeasance on “an unimaginable scale.”
If Mr. Hornak actually knows any impoverished New Yorkers, it does not show in his article. I am a retired public high school teacher who taught for many years in Flatbush, one of the city’s poorest areas. Many of my students were growing up in poverty, some of the 450,000 or so impoverished children in our city. Like the vast majority of the city’s poor, their parents worked minimum wage jobs, often two jobs, trying to make ends meet. As of January 1, 2026, a worker in New York City earning the minimum wage of $17 per hour has a gross weekly income of $680 and after taxes that person brings home monthly between $2,200 and $2,350, after federal, state, and city taxes, as well as FICA deductions, in a city where the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is approximately $3,000 to over $4,000+ per month without considering other necessary expenses.
Mr. Hornak does not mention that the Trump administration slashed SNAP payments, which provide food stamps for some 1.8 million New Yorkers to put food on the family table. For many households, cutting snap means a loss of their ability to afford an adequate supply of groceries, putting people at risk of skipping meals, incurring debt, or turning to emergency food services for the first time. I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that every school day many of my students ate a school breakfast and lunch because their working parents could not afford to buy food for these meals for their kids. The family dinner was often purchased solely thanks to the SNAP funds President Trump recently bragged about cutting in his State of the Union.
Growing up in poverty obviously puts children at risk and the city is responsible to protect these children. Protecting kids sadly costs real money. Presently, one in ten children in the New York City Public Schools System is homeless and many are at risk for domestic violence. Mr. Hornak called the large spending by the Department of Homeless Services and the Children’s Services “unfathomable,” which sadly reflects how far removed he is from the realities of daily living New York City’s hundreds of thousands of impoverished children face each day.
Mr. Hornak also fails to mention a huge factor in social spending by New York City. Republican Governors have gleefully shipped migrants to New York City. More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since spring 2022, with tens of thousands bused directly by Southern states. Texas alone reported transporting over 37,100 migrants to NYC since August 2022. Some 64,000 migrants remain in city shelters, a huge drain on the city’s budget. The influx has cost the city billions of dollars and necessitated the creation of over 100 emergency shelter sites.
Mr. Hornak touts Florida’s lower poverty rate without mentioning that many parts of Florida are rural and that Florida has a huge percentage of wealthy retirees skewing the poverty figures. He fails to mention that nearly a million children live in poverty in Florida and that six Florida counties have poverty rates in the thirtieth percentile, well above New York’s City’s 26%.
Reading Mr. Hornak’s piece, there is a mean spirited, underlying assumption that social spending actually leads to higher rates of poverty. It implies that the poor are somehow lazy and shiftless and they would be better off if the government stopped trying to help them. New York needs to have a serious discussion about poverty, but Mr. Hornak’s simplistic contention that social welfare spending worsens poverty is simply not borne out by the facts. I suggest he actually spend time with the millions of New Yorkers who need help to make ends meet. Cutting funds is only going to make poverty worse, not better.
