Gov. Hochul owes New Yorkers an apology.
For months she’s been promising to put “money back in your pockets.”
It turns out she actually meant to say she’s determined to take more money out of your pockets and give it to the MTA.
And why?
Because the MTA has big holes in its pockets and the more money she puts in there, the more money the agency needs.
So pay up, suckers.
The gang that can’t shoot straight needs another bundle of your cash.
Hochul has been in office since August of 2021 and only one in three voters say they plan to vote for her next year.
All of which is to say it’s awfully late in the day for her to be making rookie mistakes and getting hoodwinked by the bureaucracy.
And those are the kindest possible explanations for her total mismanagement of the MTA’s finances.
The agency is a sinkhole for honest New Yorkers’ money, and the governor either doesn’t know how to fix it or doesn’t care.
Neither is acceptable.
The latest evidence of malpractice comes from the Post report that deadbeat drivers skipped out on the agency’s bridge and tunnel tolls to the tune of $5.1 billion over four years, including $1.4 billion last year alone.
And that staggering sum is in addition to the nearly $800 million the MTA lost because bus and subway riders refused to pay their fares last year.
It’s an epidemic of cheating, with nearly half of riders not paying on some bus routes.
Combined, the toll and fare losses hit a mind-blowing total of $2.2 billion in a single year!
Have you heard even a peep of outrage or apology from the governor or anybody else in Albany?
Of course not.
They hope nobody notices or, more importantly, holds them accountable.
Their silence doubles the scandal and, unfortunately, offers a perfect case study of how the state’s fiscal house is riddled with waste and fraud.
The $252 billion budget Hochul proposed for the new fiscal year represents an increase of $110 billion over the last decade.
And the total will grow even bigger by the time the Legislature is finished adding its favorite pork-barrel projects and union giveaways.
The MTA, which has its own expense budget of $20 billion, is a smaller version of the same scandals.
When it fails to properly manage the gusher of money it collects, the state responds by raising taxes, tolls and fees even higher to plug the leaks.
It isn’t working, and there’s no end in sight.
Yet the governor never tried the best option — namely, fixing the MTA.
She rewards its incompetence by giving it more money to burn.
One result is that agency leaders don’t worry about getting fired for failure.
All they need to do is threaten that service will get worse if they don’t get more money — and the governor opens the spigot even wider.
DOGE has its day
New York needs a DOGE — a department of government efficiency — like the one Elon Musk is heading for President Trump on the federal level.
The $2.2 billion in MTA losses from cheating last year also throw another harsh spotlight on Hochul’s pernicious congestion tax of $9 a day to drive into Midtown Manhattan.
The plan was discredited before it started because of the way she used it to play partisan football.
She was all for it until she learned it could be a killer of Dem candidates during the November elections.
So she slammed on the brakes until the elections were over.
Then, seeing Trump’s victory and knowing he opposed it, she not only approved it, she rushed it through so it took effect 15 days before he was inaugurated.
Savings are killing us
Along the way, she cut the planned initial rate of $15 a day to $9, then had the nerve to claim the 40% reduction in the initial price would save commuters thousands of dollars a year.
Any more savings like that and we’ll all be in the poor house.
Even then, Hochul kept spinning the idea that the Midtown tax was necessary to shore up the MTA’s finances, when she had to know it wouldn’t even make up for half of the annual losses, not to mention the agency’s next round of spending increases.
And despite the tax, Hochul and legislative leaders have said additional, broad-based levies on employers would probably be part of a budget deal to close the MTA deficit.
There is also a plan to raise city subway and bus single-ride fares by 4%, to $3, this summer.
Meanwhile, the agency continues to burn through money.
A relatively small but grating example includes the decision to spend up to $1 million from a federal grant to study why so many people cheat on the bus and subway fares.
Let me guess: Because they can?
And because there are no consequences.
It’s the same logic that has led to an explosion of shoplifting. Getting caught is no big deal.
But that’s not obvious enough for officials who say they hope the study will help them better understand the mindset of the average fare evader, The Post reports.
It says early research shows that the cheaters are “opportunists, rebels, idealists” or “low-income.”
They also concluded that middle school and high school students do it because they “think it’s cool and edgy not to pay,” the agency found.
Brilliant, just brilliant.
Now do something about it!
Mistake to drop guard on mullahs
President Trump’s decision to end federal protections for three of his top first-term aides is a mistake.
The three, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Brian Hook, have been targeted by Iran over Trump’s 2020 decision to eliminate the mullah’s terror leader, Qasem Soleimani, in a drone strike.
By removing their protection and announcing it, Trump has sparked legitimate fears the men are in danger.
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, after noting that Iran has also targeted Trump, smartly summed up why he should reverse his decision.
“As the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I’ve reviewed the intelligence in the last few days,” Cotton said on Fox News, according to a Wall Street Journal transcript.
“The threat to anyone involved in President Trump’s strike on Qassem Soleimani is persistent. It’s real. Iran is committed to vengeance against all of these people.”
He added “it’s not just about these men who helped President Trump carry out his policy .?.?. It’s about their family and friends, innocent bystanders every time they’re in public. It’s also about the president being able to get good people and get good advice.
“If people are, say, going to work for the president now on Iran or China or North Korea or the Mexican drug cartels, they might hesitate to do so, or they might hesitate if they’re in office to give him the advice he needs or carry out the policies that he decides upon.”
Amen.
Do the right thing, Mr. President.
Before it’s too late.