Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s recently elected next mayor, has big spending plans. But according to David Stockman, NYC already spends much more per capita than any other big city in America. Stockman writes:

In one sense, the tables below comparing the finances of New York City (NYC) with the next nine largest US cities tells you all you need to know. When it comes to spending and taxing the bejesus out of its own citizens, NYC stands at the top of the heap. And when you dig into the numbers and standardize the comparisons, the story is every bit as bad as it appears on the surface.

As it happens, New York City finances are highly centralized in a unitary city-county entity, which is unlike many large cities where local government functions are split between the city, the county, independent school districts and other special purpose units of local government. Los Angeles provides a good example of the latter where only 34% of local govenrment spending runs through the city budget proper—with the balance handled by the county, the Los Angeles Unified School District and other entities.

So in order to obtain apples-to-apples budget and tax comparisons among the top 10 cities, we use the standardized data produced by the Lincoln Institute, which converts municipal spending by relevant units of local government into a “fiscally standardized cities”(FiSC) measure. The latter aggregates all spending for municipal functions within a city’s borders, including that provided by county governments or special districts, such as independent school systems.

Thus, New York City’s budget outlays in FY 2024 posted at the staggering sum of $107.1 billion, which amounted to $12,476 per capita among the city’s population of 8.413 million. Yet even when you use the FiSC measure for the next nine largest cities shown in the table below, it is evident that New York is well at the top of the heap.

New York’s total per capita budget outlays, for instance, are 14% higher than Chicago, 25% higher than Los Angeles, 41% higher than Phoenix, 71% higher than San Antonio, and nearly 40% more per capita than the average for the next nine largest cities in the US.

Read more here.