Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Fred Siegel and Nicole Gelinas: Taking New York Back to the Bad Old Days - WSJ.com

Fred Siegel and Nicole Gelinas: Taking New York Back to the Bad Old Days - WSJ.com: "Mr. de Blasio also has invoked another ghost of New York's grim fiscal past: simple incompetence. On May 8, the mayor painstakingly explained to the media exactly how he had balanced the budget. Two business days later, his budget staff had to convene an emergency teleconference—to tell reporters that the budget wasn't balanced after all.

The city's independently elected comptroller, Scott Stringer, had flagged Mr. de Blasio's most obvious sin: the delayed accounting for $725 million in retroactive raises to teachers who retire soon. That fiscal obligation had been moved far beyond that period, which is an accounting no-no. But forcing Mr. de Blasio to move the sum to this year's budget fixes only one-sixth of the $4.3 billion monster in the pipeline—that is, the future cost of past raises for all teachers, not only those who are soon to retire."



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