Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP via Getty Images
Mayor Zohran Mamdani spiked the ball Tuesday, as the city’s budget crunch seemed to go away as quickly as it had appeared.
He announced that Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers would dollop a few extra billion dollars on Gotham over the next few years to patch up the city’s suddenly balanced budget.
But the mayor’s revisionism, coupled with the slipshod manner in which the budget is being balanced, gives reason to worry that he will struggle to handle less avoidable fiscal challenges ahead.
The mayor insists he “uncovered” a massive budget deficit upon taking office, a strange term to describe something that had been warned about for the better part of a year, including by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.
New York City is now in its fourth year of spending more than it collects, and spending has far outpaced inflation for a decade.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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John Ketcham is a legal policy fellow and director of Cities at the Manhattan Institute. Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.