Five weeks ago, the New York Post broke a story that millions of tax dollars were officially earmarked by the City Council to nonexistent accounts so that they could be allocated later to legitimate nonprofit organizations. The idea was that since all funding is required to be made at the beginning of a fiscal year, and many groups don’t know how much they’ll need six, eight, or ten months in advance, some system needed to be created to make that money available.

There’s not much new. Different kinds of phony allocations have been used for decades for the same purpose. It is becoming clear that there was never any intent to deceive, or to send money to groups that don’t meet whatever set of official criteria is in place for such “member items.”

Of course, the widening investigation has turned up a number of these earmarks that have at least the appearance of favoritism or conflict of interest, and two City Council staffers have been arrested for stealing some of this money. But that’s not the real problem, and until we identify and fully address the real problem, what we’re seeing now will reappear again and again.

The real problem is