Happy Tuesday in New York City! Last night brought all the chaos and drama we expected: heightened security lines snarled foot traffic into Madison Square Garden; Donald Trump was roundly booed by his home-town crowd, and the Knicks’ first loss in 46 days only intensified the post-game rowdiness as tens of thousands of fans hit the streets with some brawling, police confrontations and 21 arrests. 

We wake up in the cold light of a Tuesday morning to all the fiscal realities of a city that must keep the traffic lights on even after the final buzzer sounds in MSG. 

Facing a historic $12 billion two-year spending deficit, Mayor Mamdani announced on May 12 that he had successfully balanced the budget through a combination of cash infusions from Albany, delaying expensive programs and restructuring pensions.  

However, several fiscal watchdogs, including Comptroller Mark Levine, are already turning their attention to next year, when the deficit monster will return even bigger and fiercer than before. According to Levine, the city will face an $8.8 billion budget gap starting on July 1, 2027, without the luxury of many of the “one shot” measures that Mamdani used up this year. 

The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) is similarly critical of Mamdani’s lack of long-term planning. In a paper released this morning, CBC praised the mayor for balancing the 2026-2027 budget but rang the alarm about the City’s long-term challenges. “Without a major effort to shrink spending growth, the City risks a self-inflicted crisis requiring significant service cuts or uncompetitive tax increases,” the paper reads.

One strategy is to guarantee reliable funds in the rainy day reserve through a city charter revision. In a prepared statement to City & State, Levine proposed a target balance of 16% of tax revenue with a 10% floor. The Charter Revision Commission plans to kick off for the year with a public hearing later today. 

“We have all the raw ingredients we need to solve this, and we still have time,” Levine told City & State. “Let’s act decisively.”

Oh, well. Basketball returns tomorrow to plunge us again into the warm delusion of a world where living giants perform tricks for our entertainment.

In times past, when we wanted to know which team would win the World Cup, we had to turn to seers with crystal balls, use divination via tea leaves, or hope for Paul the Octopus to tell us what would happen.

But modern data science can provide a better alternative. As part of a team of statisticians, I helped train a machine learning algorithm to predict the most likely course of the tournament.

The algorithm we built proceeds in two steps, producing a probabilistic forecast for each possible match in the tournament. 

Read on to learn more.

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