by David Stockman, Lew Rockwell:
Despite all the gumming this morning about New York City’s allegedly shocking election of a self-professed socialist mayor, the real point is that New York City is already tantamount to a Welfare State dystopia. The election of Mamdani, therefore, is more in the nature of a pre-needs bankruptcy filing, which will now surely coming steaming down the tracks at an accelerating pace.
In one sense, the tables below comparing the finances of New York City (NYC) with the next nine largest US cities tells you all you need to know. When it comes to spending and taxing the bejesus out of its own citizens, NYC stands at the top of the heap. And when you dig into the numbers and standardize the comparisons, the story is every bit as bad as it appears on the surface.
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As it happens, New York City finances are highly centralized in a unitary city-county entity, which is unlike many large cities where local government functions are split between the city, the county, independent school districts and other special purpose units of local government. Los Angeles provides a good example of the latter where only 34% of local govenrment spending runs through the city budget proper—with the balance handled by the county, the Los Angeles Unified School District and other entities.
So in order to obtain apples-to-apples budget and tax comparisons among the top 10 cities, we use the standardized data produced by the Lincoln Institute, which converts municipal spending by relevant units of local government into a “fiscally standardized cities”(FiSC) measure. The latter aggregates all spending for municipal functions within a city’s borders, including that provided by county governments or special districts, such as independent school systems.
Thus, New York City’s budget outlays in FY 2024 posted at the staggering sum of $107.1 billion, which amounted to $12,476 per capita among the city’s population of 8.413 million. Yet even when you use the FiSC measure for the next nine largest cities shown in the table below, it is evident that New York is well at the top of the heap.
New York’s total per capita budget outlays, for instance, are 14% higher than Chicago, 25% higher than Los Angeles, 41% higher than Phoenix, 71% higher than San Antonio, and nearly 40% more per capita than the average for the next nine largest cities in the US.
Nor can the NYC’s Brobdingnagian budget be explained by Gotham being some kind of special refuge for the poor and downtrodden. Its poverty population of 1.53 million represents 18.2% of its total population, which is only a tad above the weighted average of 16.3% poverty population for the next 9 large cities.
Moreover, there are several large cities that have higher poverty rates than New York City, but nevertheless have spending levels per capita that are substantially below those of the SRG (Socialist Republic of Gotham).
Thus, Houston with a poverty rate of 21.2% spends only $7,790 per capita or just 64% of New York’s level. Likewise, the busted down city of Philadelphia has a 20.3% poverty rate but it’s apples-to-apples spending is just 86% of that for NYC.
