{"id":633,"date":"2026-05-28T08:07:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T08:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=633"},"modified":"2026-05-28T08:07:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T08:07:56","slug":"progressives-cheer-as-mamdani-robs-the-future-to-waste-money-in-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=633","title":{"rendered":"Progressives cheer as Mamdani robs the future to waste money in the present"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The socialists have been swooning ever since Mayor Mamdani announced he had managed to balance New York City\u2019s $125 billion budget.<\/p>\n

Read more Michigan teen girl fights off repeat sex offender who attacked her while walking home from school<\/a><\/p>\n

Sen. Bernie Sanders acclaimed the new mayor for confronting \u201ca huge budget deficit\u201d and bringing it \u201cdown to zero,\u201d while still boosting spending.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis Man is a LEGEND,\u201d gushed Mamdani superfan Ryan Rozbiani on X.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething that nobody else could do,\u201d marveled lefty influencer Suzie Rizzio.<\/p>\n

Funny how these progressives don\u2019t acknowledge how <\/em>Mamdani is doing it: By burdening future taxpayers with pension costs he\u2019s refusing to pay now. So much for being the party of the working man.<\/p>\n

Mamdani has spent his career bemoaning \u201causterity,\u201d a label reflexively applied to almost any effort to constrain the growth of government spending.<\/p>\n

The mayor doesn\u2019t want to be accused, by public employee unions or his fellow Democratic socialists, of practicing austerity \u2014 so instead he\u2019s using a feature in the way New York City pays for pensions to make the next mayor do it instead.<\/p>\n

New York City, like many public employers, for years promised bigger pensions than the funds set aside while employees were working would cover.<\/p>\n

That became especially clear after the Great Recession: Re\u00adtirees were living longer and investments weren\u2019t generating the huge returns on which the pension systems depended.<\/p>\n

Making things worse, Albany had retroactively sweetened pension benefits, creating new liabilities for taxpayers to fund after the fact.<\/p>\n

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So New York City kicked the can down the road, devising a plan to pay off this newfound pension debt, with interest, over 22 years \u2014 into the early 2030s.<\/p>\n

Rather than cut costs to balance his budget, Mamdani got permission from Albany to shove those pension costs even further into the future.<\/p>\n

Under the new legislation, the city pension systems (which also cover the New York City Transit Authority, Health+Hospitals and a few small agencies) would get $31 billion toward that old pension debt between this year and mid-2032, instead of the $48 billion they had expected.<\/p>\n

But that money will have to be paid eventually \u2014 with even more interest.<\/p>\n

Put simply, Mamdani is forcing taxpayers to spend a total of $7 billion on interest to avoid having to trim between $2 billion from the annual budget in this and most of his possible second term \u2014 and then to slam the mayor who takes office in 2033 with about $4 billion per year in completely avoidable costs. All to avoid the dreaded A-word.<\/p>\n

Those out-year costs, and the pressure they\u2019ll put on existing city programs, conveniently don\u2019t show up in City Hall\u2019s out-year projections.<\/p>\n

The mayor should be confronting the city\u2019s long-standing mismatch between revenue and expenses without resorting to gimmickry, especially absent an emergency or recession.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Doing the tougher things today, like consolidating half-empty schools, changing the way the city provides employee benefits or deploying more technology in city agencies, would both improve services and reduce costs in the long run.<\/p>\n

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But someone might call that \u201causterity.\u201d<\/p>\n

So let the next mayor worry about it.<\/p>\n

This one\u2019s devoted disciples sure won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The socialists have been swooning ever since Mayor Mamdani announced he had managed to balance New York City\u2019s $125 billion budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"\nProgressives cheer as Mamdani robs the future to waste money in the present - Metro Transit Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=633\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Progressives cheer as Mamdani robs the future to waste money in the present - 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