skidder:

Great post by Chris:

This is a cop-out when there’s no constructive criticism about the MTA’s finances, so let’s explain how the MTA got saddled with a deficit every year – and sometimes multiple times a year. One of its biggest sources of revenue is real estate transaction taxes. Look at what real estate has done in the past two years. That revenue has barely topped 50% of its projection. If the real estate market was booming, we might not be in as big a mess. Secondly, one of the MTA’s biggest expenses is paying down debt on bonds it took out during the Pataki administration, when the MTA was terribly underfunded and MTA money was diverted to road maintenance. These are two key reasons the MTA has had such a huge deficit for the past three years. Neither of these are within the control of the MTA, and especially not the MTA’s current management, which has been on the job for less than four months.