On May 20, New York City experienced a summer storm, causing Brooklyn and Queens to flood, with streets turning into knee-deep rivers, cars submerged, and subway stations flooded. This happens whenever there is heavy rain; subway service has been disrupted due to flooded stations more than 75 times since 2020.

This happens with some frequency because New York City’s infrastructure is ancient, poorly maintained, and falling apart. The city relies on catch basins — the grates in the street — to capture rainwater runoff, and this decades-old network floods any time rainfall exceeds 1.75 inches per hour — a not-uncommon event. Even when rainfall is within the sewer system’s capacity, the catch basins often back up because they are clogged with trash and other debris, and city crews don’t keep them all clear.

In most areas of the city, stormwater drains into the same sewer that carries toilet waste to treatment plants, so when those grates back up, they flood the street with urine and feces.

New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, says that this is happening because the city doesn’t have enough money and city agencies are “underfunded.” His solution is to “tax the rich,” with a new tax on incomes over $1 million, as well as increases in corporate tax rates. He believes these proposals would raise about $10 billion per year in new revenues. New York City residents already pay the highest tax rates in the country.

But New York City’s municipal government is not “underfunded.” The city’s municipal spending is dramatically higher than that of other large cities, spending about $125 billion per year. Los Angeles, by comparison, has an annual budget of $14 billion, and Chicago’s budget is $18 billion. New York is spending about $23,000 per year per resident, while Chicago spends $9,100 and LA spends $5,400.

New Yorkers might be forgiven for wondering where all that money is going as they watch rats fighting over garbage while they wait for delayed subway trains in dilapidated stations.

For starters, New York pays about 10 times as much to build, update, and maintain things like sewers and subways as other global cities like Paris and Tokyo do for similar projects. Some of that cost is attributable to the complexity and age of New York’s underground infrastructure, but most of the expense comes from corrupt contracting, ridiculous labor rules that require excessive staffing at ridiculous wages, and complex and arcane environmental and regulatory requirements that employ armies of highly paid bureaucrats and consultants who fulfill the important task of producing reports that nobody reads at great public expense.

New York also has to pay high salaries; NYC has about twice the population of Los Angeles, but has seven times as many public workers. The city’s department of social services has 12,000 employees, doing outreach and providing resources to drug addicts and the mentally ill. But despite the best efforts of so many city workers, it is routine to see homeless people sprawled unconscious on the sidewalk in Manhattan’s trendiest neighborhoods.

Further, New York spends more per student than any other school system in the world, yet New York’s public school students lag behind those in other U.S. cities. Despite spending $35,000 per student per year, only 23% of NYC eighth graders achieved a score of proficient on the National Assessment of Education Progress test for math; 29% were proficient in reading. The school system is hiring more teachers and administrators even though it serves fewer and fewer students each year. Families are skipping vacations, wearing old clothes, and stretching their budgets to the limits to send their kids to private schools because Mamdani’s lavishly-funded public schools are so catastrophically inadequate.

And, of course, New York taxpayers fund lavish benefits for illegal aliens. New York City has spent about $9 billion on this since 2023. The city allocates $350 per day to each migrant household to cover food, shelter, and security. The city is paying for over 21,000 hotel rooms each night to host these important guests.

Zohran Mamdani thinks government is great and New York needs more of it. More city workers paid six-figure salaries to prompt ChatGPT to write emails that other city workers will then prompt ChatGPT to read. More money for NGOs. More money for more teachers and school administrators for fewer students. More money for migrants. And maybe, if New Yorkers can just dig a little deeper and pay just a little more, Mamdani’s underfunded government just might send somebody to clear out the storm drain.

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Daniel Friedman is the Edgar Award-nominated author of “Don’t Ever Get Old.”

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Mamdani’s Sewer Budget Blowout Gives New Yorkers The Flush