This is Planet Money from NPR.

Every Tuesday morning, this very easy to overlook, but incredibly important thing happens on the street where I live in Brooklyn.

Three employees of the city of New York roll up in a giant truck

and take away all the garbage for the people in my apartment building.

Those guys in their stained de-glow green t-shirts,

they are just one part of this vast army of workers

who make a city like New York even possible to live in.

An hour or so after these sanitation guys roll through, my daughter packs up her bag.

Am I going to need a rank of today?

I don't know of the weather.

And heads out to her public middle school.

Bye, sweetie.

Bye.

Where she will be educated by yet more city employees.

Those sirens you are hearing, those are because just down the street from where my daughter catches her bus each morning, there is a fire station manned by, you guessed it, city

employees.

Altogether, more than 300,000 people work for the city of New York.

300,000 people who make it possible for the city to function.

And this marvel of social coordination, like so many things in our world, is made possible by money.

Yeah, my family pays city income tax and property tax and sales tax.

And because my wife is self-employed, something called the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation

Mobility Tax.

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