There’s a certain kind of funhouse mirror that can make a fat person look thin, or a big person look small. Partisans of Mayor Bloomberg are trying this sort of stunt in advance of today’s meeting of the Financial Control Board, which has overseen the city’s finances since the crisis of the late 1970s. We gather this from a graphic (reprinted above, right) that ran yesterday in The New York Times newspaper along with a dispatch about the New York City budget. “The city government is at its smallest since the Koch administration,” the newspaper claimed. The support on which this claim rests seems to be that, as the article claims, “the total city-financed work force” is down to 200,276 employees. This, the article says, “is the lowest it has been since 1986, meaning Mr. Bloomberg has already cut out all the employees Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani had added by the end of his tenure.”

It sounds impressive — until you find out that “city-financed work force” is only a fraction of the entire city government work force. Even after Mr. Bloomberg’s cuts, the city work force in 2004 will be 241,938. Using the apples-to-apples comparison of the Citizens Budget Commission (please see the chart above, left) — that’s still thousands more workers than the city had during three years of Mr. Giuliani’s administration. In 1995, for example, the city had 237,300 workers; in 1996, it had 235,069; in 1997, it had 236,962. And it’s tens of thousands more workers than the city had in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even these numbers significantly understate public sector employment in New York, because they don’t include the tens of thousands of contractors and temporary employees.

No one is calling for a return to the New York City of the late 1970s. Many of the employees added to the city payroll in the years since then are police officers who have contributed to the drop in crime that has made the city a safer, more prosperous place. But the growth in the city payroll during the later Giuliani years came as Mr. Giuliani was cutting taxes on New Yorkers. Mr. Bloomberg, on the other hand, has been raising taxes to support a city payroll that, after all the cuts, is still larger than it was during three years of Mr. Giuliani’s administration.

The effort to draw a distinction between the “city-financed workforce” and the city workforce as a whole is like the fun-house mirror. It can make you feel better, but it doesn’t tell you how big you really are. “City-funded employment is by no means the right measure of the size of city government,”says the Manhattan Institute’s budget expert, E.J. McMahon. He cites the example of employees at the city’s senior centers moving from the city-funded Department of the Aging to the non-city-funded Housing Authority and magically reducing the “city-financed workforce.” The same employees are still there. They are working for the same mayor. They are doing the same job. The government hasn’t gotten any smaller. The overall burden on the taxpayers hasn’t gotten any smaller. Anyone who thinks it has is suffering under an illusion. Notes a senior research associate at the Citizens Budget Commission, Douglas Offerman: “The mayor is the mayor of all employees”of the city, no matter where the funding to pay them comes from.

The number of employees, too, isn’t the only way to measure the size of city government. Another factor is how much they are paid. And while the city, thanks to Mr. Bloomberg’s trims, may have 3.5% fewer employees in 2004 than it had in 2000, each employee will cost the city 29.5% more in 2004 than the employee cost in 2000, according to a Citizens Budget Commission analysis. That increase, driven in part by the generous contracts Mr. Bloomberg has struck with the public employee unions, far outpaces inflation. It also outpaces the increases in wages and benefits in the private sector and in other cities during this period.

The same fun-house-mirror game is being played by the Bloomberg partisans when they measure the city’s projected budget gap “as a percentage of city revenue.” The national newspaper whose local news desk fell for the “city-financed work force” stunt also was tricked by this one. It’s surprising, because the Washington bureau of the national newspaper reg ularly manages to write about the national deficit without referring to it as a percentage of federal revenues.

Mr. Bloomberg deserves credit for what reductions in the city workforce he has made. And we certainly join the Bloomberg partisans in hoping that the city’s economy will begin growing rapidly and that eventually it will be possible to roll back the tax increases imposed by Mr. Bloomberg. Still, the city’s recovery and growth are going to be slowed by the tax increases. And the next time a recession hits, New Yorkers will still be stuck again trying to support the burden of an immense and wasteful city government that is so big in part because lots of influential people are still perceiving it through the fun-house mirror.