Money Well Spent?

Balancing a checkbook is hard. It's not easy to make money, and saving it is harder, so how we spend our money, and what we spend it on, is something we constantly struggle with.

I have no advice to proffer about what you or anyone should spend money on. But I believe in the maxim only to buy things that you know to be useful or believe to be beautiful or that make you happy. Everything else is a waste of money.

But even then it's not always easy to know what to spend money on. Sometimes a wise purchase looks less wise in retrospect. Conversely, sometimes today's savings is tomorrow expense ("penny-wise-and-pound-foolish").

Take, for example, the Second Avenue Subway. For decades, we were told that NYC needed this and, finally, after billions of dollars spent, it opened in 2017. And yet ... ridership is relatively low. And the money spent on it was not spent on improvements to existing lines. Was it money well spent? It's not clear.

Same with WNYC radio. The great hometown public radio station is a long ways ways from being a municipal utility. Today, it's a giant business, with hundreds of employees, sisters stations, and numerous podcasts and streams. And it pays accordingly: when added up, the CEO of WNYC makes over $1 million a year. Much of this comes from donors and "sponsors" (i.e. advertisers) of the station. Sure, WNYC is great radio but does the CEO deserve to be paid that much? I'm not 100% certain.

Finally, is axing a massive amount of staffers from the Daily News really a financially prudent move? Yes, it'll save money in the short term but in the long term a great NYC paper will be diminished and not really be worth reading. You can't do great journalism on the cheap and, in my opinion, this'll hurt paper in the long run and probably cost it more money. 

Money is hard -- to make, save, spend, and most of all, get the greatest value from. This is vexing problem and, as we see in NYC today, even the most powerful among us struggle with it.