 |
(Photo: Courtesy of the City of New York) |
The real-estate boom has spiked property-tax income to nearly a quarter of the city’s income; Wall Street’s gargantuan year-end profits have also filled city coffers, increasing tax revenue from personal income and corporations. Here’s where a third of your paycheck went over the last eleven months.
Employees: 312,989 full-time equivalent workers.
Annual Revenue: $59.263 billion (none of which is profit), based on the 2007 budget. Though last year the city ran about a $2 billion deficit, a balanced budget is projected for ’07.
New Yorkonomics: The city’s $60 billion budget is about $7,500 worth of spending per capita, which is more than 25 percent of the income of the average city resident. Why is the city so expensive? The roughly 1.6 million New Yorkers in poverty make it more expensive to provide schooling, police, and social services. Even without that poverty, the city’s extraordinary density comes at a substantial cost: infrastructure that makes New York much more expensive to run than some Sun Belt suburb.
Email
Print
Review: Nabokov’s Unfinished Last Novel
David Edelstein on The Road and More
Performa 09: All New York’s a Stage
Reinventing Blanche Dubois at BAM
The 2009 Gift Finder 
Oceana Morphs Into an Expense-Account Joint 
The Spotted Pig’s Official Restaurant Forager 
100 Gifts Under $100
Dissecting Obama's Extended Family
The Bitter Aftermath of the Taconic Crash
The Kidney Transplant That Saved Two Lives 
Why True Fans Endure the Knicks’ Rebuilding
