Nicole is in today’s New York Post with an op-ed highlighting the weaknesses of the “doomsday budget” unveiled last Friday by Mayor Bloomberg.
Her key point:
With Wall Street self-destroyed, New York must get used to a vastly different future. Yet Bloomberg made only modest overtures toward acknowledging that things likely have changed forever.
Yes, he brought up the specter of municipal bankruptcy unless the city makes huge changes – but he’s still asking for far greater sacrifice from the public and the ailing private sector than from the outsized public sector.
Nicole wraps it all up by citing an aspect of the mayor’s fiscal projections that has been almost lost in the shuffle of alarmist news coverage: Bloomberg’s “inexplicable expectation of a huge improvement in the budget in just 16 months.” Starting in mid-2010, Nicole notes, the mayor “expects 8.4 percent growth in existing tax revenue, driven by a 20.1 percent gain from the personal-income tax.”
But Friday the mayor pointed to a chart of the more modest Wall Street profits from a generation ago and said that when surviving firms recover, they might recover only to such profit levels. Why expect a personal-income boom?
[snip]
So it would be safer to assume nothing. That, and not counting on a permanent sales-tax hike, would make the deficit balloon to nearly $7 billion by then, instead of $3.2 billion. Such numbers would make it harder for labor, the City Council (and everyone else, too) to dodge real reforms.
About the Author
You may also like
New York’s Medicaid Spending Is Running Billions Over Budget
New York's Medicaid program ran billions of dollars over budget during the first half of the fiscal year, adding to signs of a brewing fiscal crisis in Albany.
According to the fro Read More
Pols Craft More Handouts for Sinking Construction Unions
New York’s construction unions, facing a decades-long decline, are employing a time-honored tactic: getting state government to stop people from competing with them. Read More
Union Rallies Long Island Pols Against NYC Kids
New York’s statewide teachers union has been cashing in political chits as it seeks to block new charter schools from opening in New York City, asking the senators and assemblymembers Read More
Hospital Lobby’s TV Campaign Spreads Misinformation About Medicaid
As New York's health-care industry agitates for more money from the state budget, two of its most influential lobbying groups are airing TV ads that make alarmist and inaccurate claims about Medicaid. Read More
Hochul’s ‘Pay and Resolve’ Push for Hospitals Triggers Déjà Vu
Two years ago last week, I wrote in the Daily News about how then-Governor Andrew Cuomo was pushing a costly change to insurance law on behalf of a hospital group that had supported his campaign through a fund-rai Read More
The Looming Collapse of a Long-Term Care Insurer Raises Questions for DFS
As the Hochul administration presses for the creation of a "guaranty fund" to bail out failed health insurers, the state is quietly moving to seize a small company that could be the fund's first target. Read More
New York’s pricey hospitals draw pushback from labor
A City Council hearing in Manhattan on Thursday promises a rare scene in New York politics: hospitals playing defense. The council is debating whether to establish a watchdog agency focused on the high price of hospital care in New York, with a goal of helping the city and other employers contain the rapidly rising cost of health benefits for workers. Read More
Hochul puts Medicaid spending on a steeper slope
Governor Hochul is releasing the brakes on Medicaid, allowing state spending on the safety-net health plan to increase more than twice as fast as it typically did during the Cuomo administration.
Read More
Enjoying our work? Sign up for email alerts on our latest news and research.