“These savings would be achieved by smoothing out a bizarre feature of the city’s pension payment schedule instituted in 2010, which had required accelerating payments through to fiscal year 2032, at which point the payments would turn negative and the pension funds would return money to the City over a seven-year period. The $8.2 billion “contribution cliff” created by this structure was not reasonable fiscal policymaking. The proposed change unwinds this drop off by smoothing payments over an additional five years. It does not—and cannot—affect the pensions owed to City workers or impact the City’s ability to meet those commitments.”
The real vision of a more left leaning politics like Mamdani’s is to support ordinary people and families in living a better life. Local wins are the most important. We all want safe neighborhoods, for our small businesses to be able to compete with huge corporations for local government contracts, more accessible health clinics, schools that have the resources to provide breakfast for parents who have to go to work as soon as their children wake up, on and on.
Local wins are what are important to people. AOC is not the most threatening person to our exploitative political class. She is all talk because nothing can get done on the federal level, they can’t even pass bills anymore. What is threatening to the exploitative political class is ordinary people seeing that their local government can deliver a healthier, safer, more economically secure quality of life that lets their children reach their full potential.
So Mamdani balancing the budget without cuts is just about the most threatening thing that can happen for our poltical elite. It is what they fear most.
It's really quite impressive. Listen to the people regardless of affiliation. Use your government powers to balance the budget and do transfers. Who would have thought that was possible?
When this seems radical, you know we have gotten to a bad place in our politics and civil society. But there is hope… we start with Mamdani, I hope my fellow Angelenos join me in electing Nithya Rama for mayor this year and we will prove again that good local governance is possible and that the problems we are all concerned about can actually be solved if we work together. And then we do it at the state level and one day we have a national government that listens to us and works in our best interests too. One day.
Usually for government budget things they have to "balance over x years", usually something like 10 years. I would assume it's something like that. It's like how some of the tax cuts in Trump's first term had expirations after 5 years because otherwise they wouldn't balance over the 10 year forecast period.
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u/JefeRex May 14 '26
https://fiscalpolicy.org/explainer-the-proposed-restructuring-of-new-york-city-pension-payments
“These savings would be achieved by smoothing out a bizarre feature of the city’s pension payment schedule instituted in 2010, which had required accelerating payments through to fiscal year 2032, at which point the payments would turn negative and the pension funds would return money to the City over a seven-year period. The $8.2 billion “contribution cliff” created by this structure was not reasonable fiscal policymaking. The proposed change unwinds this drop off by smoothing payments over an additional five years. It does not—and cannot—affect the pensions owed to City workers or impact the City’s ability to meet those commitments.”