Keep aiming for savings

Before President Biden and Congress delivered billions of dollars in COVID aid, New York City’s budget was facing an enormous future deficit, part of which Mayor de Blasio was seeking to close with a $1 billion in savings from the city’s unionized workforce, whose paychecks and benefits are the biggest expenses in the annual spending plan.

Even though the most dire circumstance has been averted by Uncle Sam, de Blasio and his labor partners should actually follow through on his initial plan. One intelligent proposal from the city’s Independent Budget Office, which wouldn’t cut services or jobs, suggests the city could save $584 million next year by asking city employees who currently pay nothing toward their health insurance premiums, to chip in a little bit. That’s not austerity. It’s a smart, relatively painless cut, for the sake of posterity. Consider it a small contribution that those in the private sector (assuming that they still have jobs) have long made.

Blessedly, the doomsday scenarios of awful choices we faced not long ago: massive service cuts, waves of layoffs or the truly dangerous concept of borrowing money to pay operating expenses have all fallen off the table.

But smart savings, finding efficiencies and eliminating wasteful spending must very much stay on the table. Just because New York has been saved a financial death spiral doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ensure the more than $90 billion budget is being wisely spent.

The city’s tax receipts performed better than expected overall, as low-income wage earners bore the brunt of the tremendous job losses. Still, property tax receipts, sales taxes and hotel taxes took a nosedive, and aren’t expected to recover to pre-pandemic levels for several years. That, combined with consistently rising expenses, means the city faces likely $4 billion or higher deficits each year for several years, starting in July of 2022.

Congress has prevented the darkest night from falling, but it’s still not sunny times. Use the bailout we’ve been given to put those savings ideas into action.