Every family knows two things about a credit card. Having one is useful. When the roof goes or the car dies, being able to borrow is the difference between a problem and a disaster. But the card only works if you don’t max it out. Once you’re carrying a balance you can’t pay down, it stops being a cushion and turns into a trap.
New York State has a credit card too. We call it debt, and used carefully it’s a perfectly good way to build the roads, bridges, schools and water systems a state our size depends on. I’m not against borrowing. I’m against what Albany has done with the card. Quietly, year after year, without telling you, and now right up to the limit.
Here are the numbers, taken straight from the State Comptroller’s own records so nobody in Albany can wave them off.
When Tom DiNapoli became state comptroller back in 2007, New York’s total state debt stood at about $51 billion. Today it’s past $61 billion, and the state’s own projections have it approaching $98 billion within five years. That is not a rounding error or a rough patch. On the watch of the very official whose job is to guard the state’s finances, our debt has nearly doubled, and it’s on track to keep climbing.
Now the part most New Yorkers have never been told. Around 95 percent of this debt was never approved by you. The state Constitution says that when New York wants to borrow against its full faith and credit, it has to ask the voters first. That rule exists for a reason. Money your kids will be paying back ought to require your say-so. So Albany built a way around it. Instead of asking voters, the state runs its borrowing through public authorities like the Dormitory Authority and the Thruway Authority. They issue the bonds, the state quietly promises to cover the payments, and there’s no referendum and no vote. Nobody ever asks the people who actually owe the money.
If that sounds abstract, here’s a live example from just a few weeks ago. In March 2026, one of these authorities, the Dormitory Authority, sold $2.1 billion in new bonds to pay for projects scattered across state agencies and to refinance older debt. Nobody voted on it. And those bonds are paid back with your money, secured by half of every dollar New York collects in personal income tax. Here’s the part you have to read twice. The bond documents themselves say, in writing, that this is “not a debt of the State” and that the state isn’t liable for it. So the state takes your income taxes to make the payments, but officially it isn’t even state debt. That is the whole trick in one sentence.
And the Dormitory Authority is just one issuer. As of the end of 2025 it alone was carrying about $65 billion in outstanding bonds. Read that again. A single state authority most New Yorkers have never heard of owes more, in your name, than the state will admit its entire official debt to be. Multiply that across all the authorities and you start to see how 95 percent of this got off the books and onto your back.
The Comptroller’s office has a name for this. They call it backdoor borrowing, and they’ve been warning about it for years. Here’s the problem. Warnings are not results. The current comptroller has spent the better part of two decades issuing reports about this exact practice, and over those same years the debt nearly doubled and the backdoor machine kept right on running. A watchdog that barks for eighteen years while the borrowing climbs isn’t protecting you. It’s narrating the robbery.
So what does the card cost us just to carry the balance? When DiNapoli took office, the state spent about $4.6 billion a year on debt service, the principal and interest on what we’ve borrowed. Today that number is an estimated $7 billion a year, before a single dollar reaches a classroom, a hospital or a pothole. And those payments are on track to climb nearly 40 percent more over the next five years, to somewhere around $10 billion a year by 2030. That money is gone. It can’t cut your taxes, fix your trains or fund your schools. It goes to the bondholders, every year, right off the top.
Governor Hochul and the legislative leaders will tell you this year’s budget, the latest one in 16 years, was responsible. Look at where their own numbers point. State-supported debt is headed toward $98 billion, and the Comptroller’s analysis says that leaves about $351 million of room under the state’s legal debt limit by 2031. In a $268 billion budget, $351 million is a rounding error. It’s a credit card sitting one swipe under the ceiling.
So what happens when a government maxes out the card? A family would have to stop, cut back, make hard calls. Albany has a move you don’t. The limit on state debt isn’t set by a bank. It’s written into statute by the very people doing the borrowing. So when the card finally hits the ceiling, they won’t cut it up. They’ll vote to raise the limit. They’ve changed these rules before and they’ll do it again, late at night, buried in some budget deal, and call it housekeeping.
This is how a teenager behaves with a card you handed them for emergencies. They run it to the top on things you never agreed to, hide the statements, and when you finally catch them, they ask for a higher limit. It’s a betrayal of trust. And it leads to the one question Albany doesn’t want you asking. When the bill lands, who pays it?
You do. Every New Yorker does. The most heavily taxed people in the country, stuck with a debt we never voted for, covering spending we were never shown.
The Comptroller is supposed to be the one official whose entire job is to stand between the politicians and your wallet. To count honestly, warn loudly, and then actually do something about it instead of filing the same report another year. That’s the job I’m running for. The first step isn’t complicated. Tell New Yorkers the truth about what they owe, end the practice of borrowing without their consent, and stop raising the limit on a card that should have been cut up a long time ago.
Albany’s had the card long enough. Time to take it back.