How does a city plumber pull down nearly half a million dollars in a single year? In New York, the answer says as much about how the left thinks about money as it does about a leaky pipe.
As detailed by Townhall, the case centers on a New York City Housing Authority plumbing supervisor whose taxpayer-funded paycheck has become a symbol of everything wrong with the way government defines a working “economy.”
The numbers come from the Manhattan Institute’s John Ketcham, a legal policy fellow and director of the think tank’s Cities program. “A New York City plumber makes nearly half a million dollars a year by working for the city’s public housing authority,” Ketcham wrote. “In a one-year period, plumbing supervisor Jacob Markowski (41) earned $465,000, over two-thirds of which from overtime alone.”
That is not a typo. A single public employee out-earned nearly every executive in city government — most of it on overtime — while NYCHA’s buildings continue to rot with broken elevators, failing heat, and mold. The Department of Buildings has reportedly opened an investigation into Markowski’s hours. But Ketcham’s point is that the plumber is a symptom, not the disease.
“His story is just one example of the rampant corruption and dysfunction that plagues NYCHA,” Ketcham noted. “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.”
The dysfunction now sits squarely on the desk of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the self-described democratic socialist who campaigned on a promise to make New York affordable — and whose housing agency is cutting $465,000 checks for maintenance work that, by every visible measure, isn’t getting done.
Townhall’s Dmitri Bolt used the figure to make a broader argument that lands hard against Mamdani’s economic worldview. When Democrats talk about “fixing the economy,” Bolt wrote, they almost always mean raising wages, lowering prices, and juicing a handful of metrics — “never the thing an economy actually exists to do: deliver quality goods and services, and push human progress forward.”
His sharpest line cut to the core of the socialist promise: “Government does not care about the economy. It cares about jobs. Those are not the same thing… A wage is not the same thing as wealth, just as a job is not the same thing as an economy.”
It is a distinction the left rarely makes out loud, because it undercuts the entire pitch. A city can hand a plumber $465,000 a year, Bolt argued, “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.”
For the tenants of NYCHA — the very working-class New Yorkers Mamdani claims to champion — that is not an abstraction. It is the difference between a paycheck and a working elevator. Right now, the paycheck is winning.
Source: townhall.com
