In August 2023, New York City estimated that it spent $1.45 billion in Fiscal Year 2023 providing food, shelter, and aid to migrants.
New Yorkers are up in arms right now over New York governor Kathy Hochul’s and the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) imposing a “congestion pricing” scheme just for driving on the streets of Manhattan below 60th street between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekends. Charging more for existing tolls during peak hours is not unusual — the Long Island Railroad already charges extra for peak-hours tickets, and Uber prices vary during surges in ridership, for example — but the problem is imposing such a fee in the first place just for using the local streets, and then setting it so high (and trying to take credit for reducing the even more extortionate original $15 proposed fee). As Dominic Pino explains, while it might be possible to design an economically rational congestion pricing system, this isn’t it. The plan falls hard on multiple different constituencies and classes of New Yorkers, which is bad news for Hochul, who enters her second re-election campaign next year roundly unpopular and with no discernible charm or political talent. Making matters worse, the EZ-Pass system crashed the first weekday that the plan went into effect.
The New York Post has done yeoman’s work tracing the many effects of congestion pricing on New Yorkers, including:
The MTA, of course, can’t seem to think of ways to cut costs in spite of a $20 billion budget, and its chairman, Janno Lieber, went on Morning Joe to complain about not getting enough federal money: “New York gets 45 percent of the mass transit riders in the United States, we get 17 percent of federal money.” But “State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli expressed bewilderment . . . over the MTA’s wild spending habits, noting on NY1 that while congestion pricing will bring in a lot of money, it won’t settle the agency’s new capital plan, which has a funding gap of $33 billion.”
Where else could the state and city save money instead of gouging drivers? I can think of a few ways. The state, at the direction of Hochul and the Democratic legislature, spent $5 million on a “Community Commission on Reparations Remedies” to study plans for reparations for slavery, the slave trade, segregation, and racism. Over a year later, the commission hasn’t hired an executive director and says that it needs more money from the legislature. Maybe a better use of the money would have been on the subways?
And how about the migrant crisis foisted on New York by Joe Biden and by its own feckless “sanctuary” leadership? In August 2023, New York City estimated that it spent $1.45 billion in Fiscal Year 2023 providing food, shelter, and aid to migrants and “could potentially spend $12 billion on asylum seekers over next three fiscal years.” The city required a $81 million bailout from FEMA. By August 2024, the estimated cost just to the city — never mind the rest of the state — had reached $5 billion, with the mayor, Eric Adams, estimating that cost could double in 2025. In March 2024, the social services commissioner, Molly Wasow Park, told the City Council that the city was spending $388 per migrant per day. In the past three years, hundreds of thousands of migrants have passed through the city.
The people who run New York State would rather pay those costs than spend the money it would take to avoid the need for congestion pricing. That should tell you where their priorities are.