#De Blasio’s ‘shared sacrifice’ stunt shows he still doesn’t get it

Mayor Bill de Blasio made a symbolic gesture by announcing one-week furloughs for his nearly 500-person City Hall staff, himself included. Unfortunately, what it symbolized was how unseriously he’s still taking the crisis facing the city’s economy and its government.

First off, the furloughs are spread over six months, leaving endless opportunity for backsliding. Second, they’ll save less than $1 million, when the city’s now staring at a $4 billion budget hole this year, and worse in future years.

Nor does the bigwigs losing a week’s pay (maybe) make for any meaningful shared sacrifice when de Blasio is poised to lay off at least 22,000 city employees — and when hundreds of thousands of private-sector workers are now totally jobless, with many depending on food banks and other handouts.

And the budget for the Mayor’s Office is still far higher than in the last Bloomberg year.

Sadly, de Blasio’s not taking the potential permanent loss of countless jobs any more seriously. Last week, he gave the flip-off to a letter signed by 150 of the city’s top CEOs and business leaders decrying the drop in the city’s quality of life, a decline that makes it that much harder to keep doing business here.

The furlough stunt even brought some passion from city Comptroller Scott Stringer, who bitterly noted, “This is no time for empty gestures.” Indeed, “cutting 1/100th of a percent of the City budget is meaningless in the context of a $4.2 billion budget deficit.” He called the mayor’s big idea a “lazy substitute for real work.” (That’s this mayor’s fundamental work habit — you’re only catching on now, Scott?)

City Hall needs to find major, multibillion-dollar savings while preserving (or restoring) basic services to protect its tax base. But de Blasio is still praying for a miraculous rescue — even if it’s only the chance to borrow the cash and dump the problem on future mayors and taxpayers.

De Blasio is, as the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond puts it, trying to play the damsel in distress by tying himself to the tracks ahead of the on-rushing train — except that it’s New Yorkers who’ll be run over by the speeding locomotive.