“Help us financially or you will not have a national recovery”: the mayor of New York on Thursday appealed for help to Donald Trump, urging him to release billions of dollars in federal aid to help the American financial capital to overcome the consequences of the pandemic.
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While the US president is due to present his “directives” on Thursday to “reopen” the American economy, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio stressed that the first American city, epicenter of the epidemic in the country, would not recover alone from loss of income generated by the shutdown of the economy since mid-March.
He has put those losses at $ 7.4 billion at this point, for an annual budget of some $ 89 billion. “Who wants a national recovery must help the places that will help build this recovery,” he said during a daily press briefing on the epidemic, stressing New York’s leading role in the US economy. “The only force that can guarantee that we will get out of this situation properly is the federal government (…) Their time of decision has come”, he added.
The mayor, a political opponent of Donald Trump, said he spoke to the US president on Wednesday to encourage him to convince the Republican majority in the Senate to approve a new economic stimulus plan proposed by the Democratic leaders in Congress, which would unlock billions of dollars for the city and state of New York.
“I made it clear to him that his hometown needed him,” said De Blasio. “The president must step up to the plate (…) If he speaks, the Republicans in the Senate will follow.” The mayor, like Governor Andrew Cuomo, has continued to deplore in recent weeks the little money allocated to New York, a very democratic state, in the first economic aid package adopted at the end of March by Congress.
New York State alone has already recorded more than 210,000 confirmed cases of the virus and more than 11,500 deaths, according to its official figures.
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