New York City faces a migrant crisis, and the city faces its biggest budget crisis since the 1970s.
But, as two of the city’s most preeminent fiscal watchdogs reminded us this week, the city’s budget crisis is not entirely due to the migrant crisis.
Yes, our failure to manage migrants is costing us billions — but so is our preexisting failure to manage regular day-to-day spending.
Monday, state comptroller Tom DiNapoli, a Democrat, and Citizens Budget Commission chief Andrew Rein teamed up to sound the alarm in Crain’s, the city’s business newspaper. “Major looming budget gaps will have serious consequences . . . unless action is taken now,” they wrote.
Yes, the migrant crisis, costing, likely, $4 billion annually for the next few years, will cost taxpayers “what it spends to run the sanitation and parks departments combined.”
But: that migrant cost is well less than half of projected budget gaps.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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