New Yorkers are aghast that the Buffalo Bills stadium deal, which will fill the pockets of a wealthy NFL team owner with their tax dollars, is in the state budget the Legislature just adopted.

But it’s not exactly a rogue element.

The stadium giveaway is really a metaphor for the entire $220 billion package, whose defining feature — other than its enormous price tag — is the degree to which it’s packed with subsidies for well-heeled business interests and big labor unions.

No doubt the stadium deal is a useful Exhibit A. Economists on both the right and left agree taxpayers are typically the losers in such publicly funded sports-stadium arrangements.

We can’t know for sure if a harder bargain would’ve sent the team packing. But even if it had, residents wouldn’t necessarily have lost. Most spending that now goes toward Bills games would have been redirected to other forms of local entertainment. The team’s wealthy owners, the Pegula family, are among the few clear winners in this deal.

It’s the same story with most of the budget’s economic-development spending and business tax credits (some of which are just disguised spending). The budget extends all the way through 2029 the film-production tax credit (which was set to expire in 2026) that bestows nearly a half-billion dollars of taxpayer funds annually on studios that film in New York — beneficiaries include wealthy Hollywood producers. The budget also kowtows to software lobbyists by creating a “digital gaming media production credit” for the video-game industry.

Like the stadium deal, these tax credits don’t add jobs — they allow Albany politicians to reallocate them by deciding which industries will succeed and which will fail, substituting political calculus for the market’s invisible hand. This is not a winning formula, as evidenced by the state’s anemic post-pandemic jobs recovery, which lags that of nearly every other state.

Big Labor is very much an underappreciated benefactor of the stadium deal. The $1.4 billion stadium construction cost is supersized by attached prevailing-wage requirements that swelled the price tag by roughly 20% — the typical cost premium prevailing wage adds to Buffalo-area public construction. It’s basically a separate transfer payment from the public to construction unions and their pension plans.

That’s especially the case since the work will occur under a project labor agreement that stiff-arms non-union construction workers from participation. No wonder Building and Construction Trades Council President Gary LaBarbera was among the project’s most visible cheerleaders. 

The same publicly funded benevolence to unions pervades the broader budget, in ways large and small. The agreement awards a massive $7.7 billion over four years in mandatory wage hikes to employees in New York’s home-health-care industry — already the largest and best-funded in the country. That’s a big win for George Gresham, president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, a powerful union that pushed hard for the hikes, bewailing an industry in crisis.

Union perks also litter the budget’s small print. There’s a partial rollback of successful, decade-old public-employee-pension reforms that save taxpayers about a billion dollars a year. Urged on by a union campaign to “Fix Tier 6”— which alleges without evidence a crisis in public-worker recruitment — the budget reduces vesting periods from 10 years to five and cuts contribution rates in some cases. It’s a foot in the door for the campaign’s broader ambition to repeal the reforms entirely.

Even the budget’s proposed $4.2 billion environmental bond has additional prevailing-wage conditions attached. Thus dollars raised for green-energy projects won’t stretch as far, making the state’s pursuit of a costly climate agenda more expensive.

Another union win is a mandate that state entities using design-build contracts always use project labor agreements, which can drive up costs by reducing bid competition.

Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed the stadium deal and most of the other key elements of the budget agreement. It’d be fair to say the final product reflects her vision.

If she had one.

But the budget deal sprays money in so many directions and addresses so many parochial concerns, it lacks any clear focus.

An initial estimate found that the final budget hikes state-operating-funds spending to a level 18% higher than that of just two years ago.

That’s likely unsustainable. So the only clear path the state seems headed on under this budget is a road to financial insolvency.

Peter Warren is research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy.