By Kyle Smith
Saturday, September 28, 2019
For generations, New Yorkers have been paying a cartel
surcharge for taxis. A conspiracy of New York City government and business has
carefully limited the number of taxi “medallions,” without which it is illegal
to operate a taxi that picks up pedestrians hailing drivers on the street.
Owners of taxi medallions, naturally, are generous donors to the politicians
who restrict their numbers. The artificial scarcity designed to push up prices
is simply yet another way powerful special interests and politicians collude to
cheat ordinary New Yorkers in order to line their own pockets. When the
medallion system was first created, in 1937, only 13,585 of them were authorized.
Today, with the population up by more than a million and the demand for cabs up
massively, that number stands at . . . 13,587.
For 70-plus years, anyone who bought a taxi medallion was
making a bet that the supply of taxi services would remain artificially
restricted. Then came Uber. The rise of e-taxi services flooded the marketplace
with competitors for yellow-cab drivers and the value of the medallions
plummeted. Medallions once worth something like $1.3 million are now selling
for less than $250,000. So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is saying the owners of
medallions need to be bailed out. She
actually used that language.
Drivers, many of them immigrants,
were piled on w/ million-dollar loans on incomes of $~20k/year. It’s led to a
suicide crisis.
They need to be bailed out &
those responsible need to answer for it. https://twitter.com/brianmrosenthal/status/1177652287344463872
…
So New Yorkers who were forced to pay extra for taxis to
benefit medallion owners who bought off politicians are now being asked to
cover the medallion owners’ losses now that their bets have turned sour.
AOC has been bringing this matter up in congressional
hearings, as though this is somehow a federal issue. According to the New
York Post, “taxi driver advocates aren’t seeking a bailout, but city-funded
debt forgiveness, according to New York Taxi Workers Alliance executive
director, Bhairavi Desai, who testified at Thursday’s hearing.” Oh, that’s
totally different then.
If AOC or anyone else can demonstrate that any loan was
made unlawfully, she should point the way to prosecuting whatever entities
broke the law. Calling loans “predatory” won’t cut it. New Yorkers who have
been ripped off by the taxi industry all these years bear no responsibility for
making it whole now that its scheme to overcharge the public has collapsed.
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