(Via Breitbart) […]  According to Fox News, de Blasio’s proposed plan to increase the minimum wage is getting as negative a reception as the plan to fund universal pre-K. Author Barnini Chakraborty notes that the latter has run into significant problems as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a state-wide universal pre-K plan that would make de Blasio’s tax hike unnecessary–something de Blasio flatly rejected.

Fox News notes that Cuomo called the idea of making rich neighborhoods fund themselves separately from the rest of the state “repugnant.”

The minimum wage plan might meet a similar fate in Albany.

In his State of the City address, de Blasio’s minimum wage increase plan featured prominently along the universal pre-K idea and new proposition to give government identification to illegal immigrants, which would allow them to open bank accounts and access other resources in the city.

Mayor de Blasio’s plan, he explained, would be to urge Albany to allow New York City to raise its own minimum wage without touching the rest of the state. The plan would let de Blasio govern New York as more of a city-state than a mere city. It would necessarily require lawmakers in Albany to give away power to de Blasio, something to which they have already proven resistant. Governor Cuomo put it frankly: “We don’t want to cannibalize ourselves.”

Mayor de Blasio’s tenure, short as it is, already has a defining trait: the push to increasingly distance the city from the rest of the state. He wants to be New York City’s Pericles in an era where no American city can be allowed to be its own ancient Athens. (Ancient Athens, for one, had an army.)

This is most particularly reflected in how specific de Blasio’s demands for the city seem to be next to what lawmakers in Albany seem prepared to yield. Even with a legislature and an executive run by the same party, he appears less interested in achieving things than in the specific method he wants employed to achieve them.   (read more)