Gov. Kathy Hochul\u2019s OK to defer billions in payments<\/a> to city pension funds, which amounts to just borrowing the cash.<\/p>\nWhich happens to be exactly the lunacy that led to the city\u2019s 1975 financial crisis.<\/p>\n
The Empire Center\u2019s Bill Hammond notes that Hochul & Co. framed the pension \u201csmoothing\u201d scheme \u201cas an infusion of cash from the state to the city\u201d \u2014 but it\u2019s no such thing.<\/p>\n
One, the $1.2 billion it nets this year still leaves the problem \u2014 overspending \u2014 to be solved again next year; bet that Mamdani will be happy with a \u201csolution\u201d of more borrowing.<\/p>\n
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Two, as Hammond points out, the scheme lets the city skip $16.7 billion in pension payments these next seven years at a cost of $24.3 billion over the following five \u2014 a truly brutal bill when it hits.<\/p>\n
The gov is simply, as Hammond puts it, allowing \u201cthe city to take out a loan, with interest, at the expense of its own taxpayers.\u201d<\/p>\n
How generous of her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The 1975 financial crisis followed years of shoddy accounting gimmicks, refinancing debt to cover operating costs, all as the city\u2019s tax base steadily eroded.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Robbing the future to pay for the present nearly sank the city 50 years ago, and the math hasn\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n
By insisting on ballooning the budget to $127 billion, his refusing to make any real spending cuts and embracing this dodgy de-facto borrowing, Mamdani\u2019s not leading New York City into some new golden socialist era.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s leading us right back into our disastrous past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Across various social-media platforms, high-fiving lefties and progressives are praising Mayor Zohran Mamdani for balancing the city budget…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[14927,304,426,9,56,63,65,64,299,240,3555,82],"class_list":["post-246389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-city-budget","tag-editorial","tag-kathy-hochul","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-opinion","tag-pensions","tag-unions","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}