Mayor Bill de Blasio dismissed criticism that his $98.7 billion budget — the largest in the city’s history — is nearly the same as the spending plan for the entire state of Florida.
“I don’t pray at the altar of the fiscal conservatives and the budget hawks and the pro-austerity forces that have led us astray so many times and didn’t want to ever invest in working people,” de Blasio said Friday on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.”
Lehrer had asked de Blasio about criticism from “fiscal conservatives and deficit hawks,” who’ve made the comparison even though “Florida is a whole state with 20 million people, New York is a city of 8 million.”
Florida’s budget is $101.5 billion for the coming fiscal year — just under three billion less than New York City’s budget.
Fiscal watchdogs have said de Blasio spends like a “drunken sailor,” noting that his latest plan is over $10 billion more than last year’s budget. Since de Blasio took office in 2014 city spending has grown by 34 percent.
But de Blasio defended this year’s increase.
“This is a budget that invests radically in working people and in our recovery and in addressing disparity,” he said on WNYC.
“If you’re saying do I want emulate Ron DeSantis’ Florida budget? No I don’t,” de Blasio said about the governor of the Sunshine State.
“In Florida there are so many things they did not do that are needed for the people of that state and they have a view of limiting government and favoring business over people’s needs and we don’t want that in New York City,” he said.
De Blasio praised his efforts to increase Gotham’s fiscal reserves, though experts say the nearly $1 billion rainy day fund should be much larger.
The mayor also promised “to aggressively pursue … tax cheats” after Lehrer asked him about Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, who was recently indicted and pleaded not guilty to tax fraud and other charges.
“I think it’s incredibly powerful that such a prominent person is being caught doing it,” de Blasio said about allegations that Weisselberg received perks and benefits such as rent-free apartments and leased cars, without reporting them properly on tax returns.