Fiscal watchdogs, Democrats representing moderate areas in suburban and upstate districts and even US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) argued that taxes didn’t need to be raised because of the billions in federal stimulus money New York received over the last year.

The nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission was among those arguing that New York doesn’t need to hike taxes to plug holes.

Fiscal watchdogs, Democrats representing moderate areas in suburban and upstate districts and even US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer argued that taxes didn’t need to be raised because of the billions in federal stimulus money New York received over the last year.

“The state appears poised to enact a massive tax increase despite having $22 billion more resources available over the next two years than was anticipated when the governor proposed the budget in January,” CBC president Andrew Rein told The Post.

“Those funds were sufficient in themselves to reverse cuts, help those not supported by the American Rescue Plan, support educational needs from the pandemic and provide a glide path to fiscal stability.”

Between better-than-expected tax revenues and the infusion of $12.6 billion in Federal aid, state Budget Director Robert Mujica now contends there's no need for "any significant level in tax increases."

"With the additional direct aid and the higher revenue 'consensus' forecast agreed to with the Legislature, enacting the Governor's Executive Budget would result in a $9.6-billion surplus over the fiscal years 2021 through 2023," according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a pro-business think tank. "This amount is sufficient to omit the proposed personal income tax increase and still leave $5.9 billion to fully reverse the spending reductions proposed by the Governor."

Entire industries, including the arts, hotels and restaurants, were decimated, with thousands of businesses closing for good. Tourism, a pillar of the economy, is years away from rebounding, according to forecasts. And many companies are making at least some remote work a permanent feature, raising questions about the future of Manhattan without legions of office workers.

“The city still has a ways to go,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies for the Citizens Budget Commission. “You’ve got to get commuters back in Midtown and downtown, the business district. You’ve got to get restaurants and theaters reopened.”

As far as the state budget goes, Patrick Orecki with the Citizens Budget Commission says there’s still a couple days where not having an enacted budget won’t impact day-to-day governmental operations for the most part.

“Where we are now in the budget process is basically that the lack of enacted budget bills won’t really start to impact state operations until basically next week when a payroll cycle has to be run,” Orecki said.

A representative from de Blasio’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

“De Blasio’s commission can issue a final report before his term ends, but no one is going to move on this issue in the next six months,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies for the Citizens Budget Commission.

After months of delays, the tax reform commission in January 2020, offered a framework for a new system, the first step in a long process that would ultimately require approval in Albany. Adding to the complexity, the mayor also called for any city reform effort to be revenue neutral to avoid disrupting the city’s budget.

None of the recommendations were adopted. The number of subsidies have changed too much to do a quick calculation, but in 2018 Citizens Budget Commission estimated that state tax breaks had ballooned to a cost of at least $2.54 billion per year (this does not include spending on the state’s other economic development programs, which totaled $1.8 billion).

Policymakers can disagree on whether or not the main argument of Solomon and Rubin’s letter holds up. But for their tax subsidy recommendations, there is no debate.

An Afghanistan-and-Iraq level police surge is needed to make riders feel safe as they return to New York’s subways, the MTA official who oversees city subways and buses said Tuesday.

“I would like to see a uniformed presence in every station and, frankly, on every platform,” interim NYC Transit president Sarah Feinberg said during a forum with the Citizens Budget Commission. “We’re at a critical moment where people have to come back into the system and they have to feel like they’re safe.”

Rubinstein moved on to de Blasio’s ferry program, one of the mayor’s signature accomplishments, though controversial based on its limited ridership compared to other forms of mass transit and how much attention and city funding the mayor has put into it. Candidates were asked if they would keep it as is or modify it, especially with regard to the high per-ride city subsidies involved. According to a 2019 report by the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan think tank, per-ride subsides for ferry rides were $10.73 for the 2018 fiscal year, ten times higher per rider than the subsidies for riders on subways and buses, and for the ferry ridership population that is whiter and wealthier than New York City’s overall population.

The proposals for tax increases are both unnecessary, but also economically risky.

Patrick Orecki, senior research associate at the nonpartisan fiscal watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, described a personal income tax increase as “risky and unnecessary."

"The risk doesn't just come from the outmigration issue, but it's also that you're building a lot of volatility into your tax base in general," he said, pointing to the federal aid and that state tax receipts came in higher than expected.

According to the letter, President Joe Biden's newly passed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, "for which most of us argued", would provide New York with enough money to "eliminate the need for new state and local taxes this year". It also claimed that “significant corporate and individual tax hikes would make it much more difficult to revive the economic engine and reassemble the deep and varied talent pool that makes New York the greatest city in the world”.

“We are not alone in this opinion; the non-partisan Citizens Budget Commission, for example, has stated that these tax hikes are ‘both needless and economically costly,' owing to government aid and higher-than-expected tax revenues in 2020,” they said.

“If the state adopted the governor’s budget without its proposed personal income tax increases, it would run a $5.9 billion surplus over the next two years and that is even without the billions in federal elementary and secondary education aid,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

If New York does seek higher revenues, tax foes argue, it could spark an exodus of wealthy taxpayers who already pay the biggest share of the income tax.