When Democrats talk about "fixing the economy," pay close attention to what they actually mean. It is almost always increasing wages, lowering prices, and dealing with a handful of other metrics, never the thing an economy actually exists to do: deliver quality goods and services, and push human progress forward.
The result, especially wherever government runs the show, is one we are all familiar with: an economy that inflates paychecks while quietly letting quality collapse.
The New York City government has spent the last few decades perfecting this substitution, and public housing is where it shows most plainly. City payroll records reveal public employees drawing six-figure overtime checks, sometimes larger than the salaries of the mayor and City Council leadership combined, for maintaining buildings that, despite record spending, continue to fall apart around the people living in them. This is the typical story of what happens when government mistakes a wage for the value of what the actual labor produces.
A NYC plumber makes nearly half a million dollars a year by working for the state's housing authority.
— Manhattan Institute (@ManhattanInst) July 20, 2026
Rampant corruption and dysfunction plagues the New York City Housing Authority. Meanwhile, @NYCMayor and his housing czar, Cea Weaver, are treating private landlords as the… pic.twitter.com/Y5ZUlX76kB
"A New York City plumber makes nearly half a million dollars a year by working for the city's public housing authority. In a one-year period, plumbing supervisor Jacob Markowski (41) earned $465,000, over two-thirds of which from overtime alone," John Ketcham, a legal policy fellow and director of Cities at the Manhattan Institute, said. "Meanwhile, NYCHA buildings are barely struggling to stay afloat as they deal with a long list of maintenance issues and financial problems."
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"The Department of Buildings has launched an investigation against Markowski, but his story is just one example of the rampant corruption and dysfunction that plagues NYCHA," he said. "Meanwhile, Mayor Mamdani and his housing czar, Sia Weaver, treat private landlords as the villains. NYCHA's conditions are so bad that it would be by far the worst landlord in New York City. But the far-left public advocate, Jumaane Williams, doesn't even list NYCHA because it always takes that top spot. So if you want to make more money than the mayor and the city council speaker together, consider plumbing for the New York City Housing Authority."
Listen closely the next time a politician promises to raise wages or protect jobs. In the private sector, that promise carries a built-in obligation: pay has to be matched by rising productivity, falling costs, or growth that's directly tied to the quality and quantity of what a business actually produces. A company that pays its people more without producing more, eventually, simply stops existing. The market enforces that connection.
Government faces no such constraint. It can increase a plumber's pay to $465,000 a year without a single pipe getting fixed any faster, without a single building getting any safer, without producing one additional unit of value for the people funding the check. There is no competitor waiting to underbid it, no shareholder demanding better returns, no customer free to walk away. The other half of the equation, the half that forces private businesses to actually earn what they pay out, simply doesn't apply.
This is the distinction almost nobody wants to say out loud: government does not care about the economy. It cares about jobs. Those are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were is precisely how you end up with six-figure overtime checks and crumbling public housing existing in the very same city, funded by the very same government, at the very same time.
A wage is not the same thing as wealth, just as a job is not the same thing as an economy. One is a number on a check. The other is everything behind that number, value created, problems solved, lives made better by the exchange.
Confuse the two long enough, and you get exactly what New York has: a government that can point to record paychecks and record dysfunction.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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