And There Is A Similarly Progressive Way To Reveal Details

Underestimate, pat self on back for fiscal prudence, then revise numbers upward in a matter of days:

The day the deal was announced, his office said the 9-year contract, which includes two years of retroactive pay and raises going forward, would cost the city $5.5 billion.

But according to the mayor’s office on Wednesday, with the impact of the deal, which only extends through fiscal year 2018, will bring the total cost of settling the outstanding teacher’s [contract] to $8.97 billion — a 63 percent increase from the initial estimate.

Progressive Values: Revealed

We’ve said all along, as we make appointments, our standards are clear, we need people who share our progressive values related to the future of this city:

“Bill de Blasio raised prodigious amounts of money from the taxi industry during his run for mayor. Now, one of the consultants who helped him raise money from that industry is helping him regulate it.”

Making Much Progressively Progressive Progress On The GAAP Between Reality And How To Present It

Also, the talk of “good dialogue” is starting to become a trope, and shorthand for engaging in a series of unrealistic hypotheticals with the rest of the reality-based world:

In unveiling his budget proposal last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly said it toed the line between fiscal prudence and progressiveness — assuring New Yorkers that teachers and other municipal employees who had long been working without a contract could be made whole, and then some, and that the city could afford the billions of dollars their raises and back pay would cost.

But after a weekend’s digestion of the $73.9 billion spending plan, fiscal experts confronted his administration on Monday with mounting questions about the risks — and, in particular, the postponed liabilities — that Mr. de Blasio’s sanguine budget presentation had not exactly emphasized.

An analysis by the bond-rating agency Moody’s Investors Service Inc. said the budget could negatively affect the city’s credit because rising personnel costs could soon strain city finances, widening future budget gaps. But Amy Spitalnick, a mayoral spokeswoman, stressed that there has been no change in the city’s credit rating.

Then, under pressure from Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, the de Blasio administration announced that it was shifting $725 million in retroactive pay that it had sought to spread over the next four years into the current fiscal year, which ends on June 30. The money at issue was reserved for as many as 20,000 members of the city teachers’ union who may retire after July 1.

In several days of meetings between City Hall and his office, officials said, Mr. Stringer and his aides argued that the budget plan did not comply with generally accepted accounting principles that the city is legally bound to follow.

Word of the change, however, came in an extraordinary joint announcement by Mr. Stringer and Mr. de Blasio that, in two paragraphs, repeatedly played down its own significance.

The statement noted that the appropriate treatment on the balance sheet for some parts of the labor deal with the teachers’ union “is subject to varying opinions by expert accountants,” and that the change was being made merely “to ensure that the city’s financial accounting reflects a preferred approach.”

In an interview later, Mr. de Blasio’s budget director, Dean Fuleihan, called the talks with the comptroller’s office a “good dialogue,” though he also stood by the city’s earlier position, saying outside experts had endorsed it.

Also, this sounds like the Bobby Bonilla approach to balancing the books:

The contract with the teachers’ union included a much larger deferred expense that has also drawn interest: more than $4 billion in retroactive compensation, for teachers who worked in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years, that is to be paid out by the city from 2019 to 2021 — after the new contract has already expired. (The city is calling that a “restructuring” of pay because if it were treated as retroactive, it, too, would have to be absorbed in the current year’s budget, city officials have said.)

Major Moments, Minor Lifts

The “major moment in the history of health care in this city” amounts to little more than a press conference and eventual reversal, with added benefit of additional lawsuits:

Under pressure to settle the suit quickly and stem losses that were mounting at $13 million a month, SUNY agreed to ill-conceived bidding rules that favored any plan to keep LICH as a hospital, no matter how unrealistic.

Even though that deal politicized a process that should be driven by public health considerations, de Blasio hailed it as a historic breakthrough.

Just how wrong he was became clear when the winner emerged as Brooklyn Health Partners, an outfit so obviously unfit that it was quickly rejected by Blasio and the unions — and could not even come up with promised down payment of $25 million by Thursday’s extended deadline.

With the mayor’s support, SUNY then opened talks with the runner-up, Peebles Corp., which plans much the same mix of medical services and housing that de Blasio found unacceptable last year.

Standing in the way of this outcome, however, are not one but two fresh lawsuits — the first by Brooklyn Health Partners, claiming it was treated unfairly, and another by community groups that were de Blasio’s former allies, claiming SUNY violated terms of the cockamamie settlement.

The New Progressive Revolution: Low Information Voters And Celebrities Conspire To Elect A Grandstanding Moron Who Gives Away The Equivalent Of A Big Box Store To The Unions Who Fund His Commercials

This sounds like such, such bullshit:

The budget also contains more details about the contract agreement the city reached with the United Federation of Teachers last week, as well as how much the administration estimates it will cost to settle the remaining labor contracts. The mayor expects to take on $13.4 billion in new costs from labor contracts, but expects to offset all but $5.5 billion of that through health care savings and other measures.

The savings will be achieved in several ways: $3.4 billion will come from as-of-yet undetermined health care cost-cutting that Mr. de Blasio says is “guaranteed” to happen, $1 billion from a health “stabilization fund” that is controlled jointly by the Municipal Labor Council and City Hall, and $3.5 billion from a “labor reserve” fund.

A billion here, a billion there and all of the sudden you have a MetLife Stadium, with a Yankee Stadium and Citi Field to spare . . .