New York’s public-employee unions are demanding pension reforms that would slap taxpayers with over $100 billion in new costs — in a state that has already lost $111 billion in adjusted gross income over the last decade because residents keep packing their bags for Florida and Texas. If there’s a better metaphor for modern Democrat governance than demanding a raise on a sinking ship, I haven’t found it.

ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS. From a state people are running from like it’s on fire. Which, given the budget, it basically is.

Here’s what’s going on. Governor Kathy Hochul is in the middle of negotiating a $268 billion state budget, and the whole thing has ground to a halt because unions want to gut the Tier 6 pension reforms that were put in place back in 2012. Their rallying cry is “Fix Tier 6” — which is union-speak for “give us back the golden parachutes the taxpayers can’t afford.”

The unions’ wish list is a masterpiece of fiscal delusion. They want public employees to be able to retire with full pensions at age 55 — down from the current 63. For context, Social Security doesn’t pay full benefits until 67. They want to cut employee contribution rates. They want pension calculations based on the last three years of salary instead of five — a change that makes it easier to game the system through what’s called pension “spiking,” where you load up on overtime in your final years to juice your retirement check.

As the Empire Center for Public Policy has documented, New York’s pension costs exploded from less than $1 billion in 2000 to nearly $10 billion by 2010 — which is exactly why Tier 6 was created in the first place. Those reforms saved taxpayers roughly $100 billion through 2040. And now the unions want to light that $100 billion savings on fire and hand them the match.

The cost isn’t theoretical. Analysts estimate the changes would cost taxpayers $1.5 billion annually. New York City alone would get hit with an extra $170 million in pension costs in just the first year. And roughly 50% of all public employees are now in Tier 6, so this isn’t some small adjustment — it’s a full-scale rollback.

Meanwhile, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie publicly contradicted Hochul when she announced a budget deal on May 7th, saying nearly 50 items were still unresolved. Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins is caught between union donors and fiscal reality. The whole thing is a circus — except the clowns are spending your money.

And here’s the part that should make every New Yorker’s blood boil. According to IRS migration data analyzed by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, more than $2 trillion in wealth has migrated from blue states to red states over the past decade. New York is one of the biggest losers, hemorrhaging high earners to zero-income-tax states like Florida, Texas, and Nevada. The state lost net migration of at least 39,000 individuals in just one recent 12-month period.

So who exactly is going to pay for these $100 billion in pension promises? The people who are still here — the ones who haven’t figured out how to leave yet. It’s a shrinking tax base being asked to fund an expanding wish list. That’s not a budget. That’s a Ponzi scheme with a state seal on it.

The New York Post called the demand “outrageous.” That might be the understatement of the decade. You’ve got a governor who can’t get her own party to agree on a budget, unions demanding pension perks that would make a Fortune 500 CEO blush, and a population that’s voting with its feet — straight down I-95 to states that don’t treat taxpayers like ATMs.

Good luck funding that retirement plan when there’s nobody left to tax.