Hochul just let Mamdani start to borrow NYC’s way back to the 1975 financial crisis
http://nypost.com/2026/05/28/opinion/hochul-just-let-mamdani-start-to-borrow-nycs-way-back-to-the-1975-financial-crisis/
By Post Editorial Board
New York Post
Published May 28, 2026
Across various social media platforms, high-fiving lefties and progressives are praising Mayor Zohran Mamdani for balancing the city budget without harming poor and working-class New Yorkers — when all he’s done is guarantee harm after he’s conveniently left office.
The biggest piece of the state’s “bailout” is just a license to spend now and pay later.
Specifically, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s OK to defer billions in payments to city pension funds, which amounts to just borrowing the cash.
Kathy Hochul’s bailout of Mamdani’s NYC could send the city back into the 1975 financial crisis. | Susan Watts/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
Which happens to be exactly the lunacy that led to the city’s 1975 financial crisis.
The Empire Center’s Bill Hammond notes that Hochul & Co. framed the pension “smoothing” scheme “as an infusion of cash from the state to the city” — but it’s no such thing.
One, the $1.2 billion it nets this year still leaves the problem — overspending — to be solved again next year; bet that Mamdani will be happy with a “solution” of more borrowing.
Two, as Hammond points out, the scheme lets the city skip $16.7 billion in pension payments these next seven years at a cost of $24.3 billion over the following five — a truly brutal bill when it hits.
The gov is simply, as Hammond puts it, allowing “the city to take out a loan, with interest, at the expense of its own taxpayers.”
How generous of her.
The 1975 financial crisis followed years of shoddy accounting gimmicks, refinancing debt to cover operating costs, all as the city’s tax base steadily eroded.
Robbing the future to pay for the present nearly sank the city 50 years ago, and the math hasn’t changed.
By insisting on ballooning the budget to $127 billion, refusing to make any real spending cuts and embracing this dodgy de-facto borrowing, Mamdani’s not leading New York City into some new golden socialist era.
He’s leading us right back into our disastrous past.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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