Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is my colleague Steve Melanga. Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on today's show is

my colleague Steve Malanga. He's the senior editor of City Journal and the George M. Yeager Fellow at the

Manhattan Institute. And he's the author of a brand new story in our summer issue of our quarterly

magazine. It's called an epidemic of bad budgeting, and that's

mostly what we're going to talk about today. So, Steve, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure. This piece, and it's in our print issue, walks through the kind of crisis that

cities were facing when hit with the pandemic, the budget crisis. Your

argument was that their situation actually was based on some pre-existing financial problems

that have subsequently been masked over by all of the federal aid that's been coming from both

the Trump administration and now the Biden administration after the pandemic struck,

that they've basically bailed these cities out so that the underlying financial problems have been hidden.

Could you just describe the main themes of this print feature story and just how acute was the financial problem becoming before the pandemic struck?

Yeah, so when the pandemic did hit cities as well as states, made a lot of appeals first to the Trump administration and later to the Biden administration

for direct budgetary aid. Much of the aid that came during the Trump administration was actually

in the form of direct aid to support the effort against the pandemic itself, aid to hospitals,

expanding Medicaid.

But the cities complained that the shutdown in the economy that they said was necessary

had also destroyed their budgets.

And although Trump would not provide any direct aid of this sort, and Republicans refused to do so,

when the Biden administration came in,

they put together an unprecedented $350 billion package for states and cities.

...