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.