Goes right along with expressing costs in Really Big Numbers! without giving context. For example, the $200M/year spent on pension fees is 0.2% of NYC's annual budget of $78B.
Are you sure that NYC has an annual budget of $78B? That's a humongous number for any city, and an outrageous number for a city with a Subway system that is (supposedly still) in a state of disrepair.
Part of the reason the subway is so messed up is it's run by the state, not the city, as part of the general state-wide public transit. The city/state relationship is messed up, the debacle of the subways shutting down for only 6" of snow was because the governor mandated it without talking to the mayor.
NYC (pop. 8.4M): 78B
Los Angeles (pop. 3.8M): 8.1B USD
Toronto (pop. 2.8M): 10B CDN
Chicago (pop. 2.7M): 9B USD
I expected the city's budget to be in the double-digit billions, but in the 40 - 50 billion range.
I wonder if it's something in how the headline numbers are calculated. Toronto splits out its operating and capital budgets, and there are some services like social housing that are (used to be?) cost-shared between the provincial and municipal government.
That said, most people just don't realize (or take for granted!) all the services that cities provide: police, fire, paramedics, garbage/sewer, water, roads and public transit - many of which are highly labour intensive.
> I wonder if it's something in how the headline numbers are calculated.
This is correct. NYC is basically sui generis for American cities. As examples, there's essentially no county government and the school system is part of the city government. The school system alone accounts for $20B of the $78B and over 100,000 of the 360,000 city employees...AND those school numbers don't include the $900M for the city-funded-and-operated 4-year university system.
That's around $10k/resident (and the city gets immense amount of non-resident visitors). Given things like public schools, transport, fire/police, etc. it doesn't seem particularly high to me.
The $78B budget for the city doesn't include the transit system. MTA's budget is $14B/year, with $7B of that going to NYCTA (the part of MTA which runs the subways and the city's buses).
"Disrepair" is a strong word. There are problems, but most of the time, it runs smoothly for me. It's an enormous piece of infrastructure that mostly works. That's no small feat.
This is an increasing and pernicious trend in political discourse.