City needs to kick its spending habit

From the NY Post:

...the alarmist talk of "doomsday" budgets and "crippling" service cuts makes truth a casualty. The Big Lie is that City Hall and Albany don't have any money.

By any historic measure, they are filthy rich. The windfall they take in would make Tammany Hall blush and was inconceivable just a few years ago.

New York City will spend over $63 billion this year. In Mayor Bloomberg's first year, 2002, it spent $41 billion.

That's an increase of 57 percent in unadjusted dollars. Thanks to unrelenting tax and fee hikes and the economic boom, revenues, including state and federal aid, grew by as much as $5 billion a year.

The city spent it all, and then some. Only once, last year, did it spend less than the year before. That decrease was under 3 percent, though it seemed draconian to hear the wailing over minor cutbacks.

Even now, $63 billion is apparently not enough to maintain essential services. On this broken model, nothing can be.

Like parents who lost their kids because they self-destructed, the city is perpetually broke because it is addicted to binge spending. And too much of what it spends is a handout to well-connected interests and advocates that doesn't benefit the public.