Mamdani: Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste, Even If You Have to Invent One

Meanwhile, Z-Man unveiled his first budget, a $127 billion extravaganza of cornucopia that threatened to make the city's fiscal situation (already dire) even worse. New York City is running a $5.4 billion deficit, down from the $12 billion deficit Mamdani had estimated when he took office. Some shameful bookkeeping and a little luck, via a higher-than-expected increase in revenues and a $1.5 billion gift from Hochul, shaved the posted deficit by $7.3 billion.  

Without Hochul's thumbs-up on a tax increase, Mamdani is going to have to raise property taxes. He's threatening a 9.5% proprety tax increase on city homeowners, which threatens his "soak the rich" persona and could effectively end his career before he even gets to handing out the "free" stuff he promised during the campaign.

Mamdani is holding the people of New York City hostage to force Hochul to grant him his corporate and personal tax increases so he won't have to balance his budget on the backs of the middle class.

"The no-pain, free-stuff optimist has turned into a doomsayer who grimly warns that he may have to raise taxes on working- and middle-class New Yorkers, and that even such a tax hike may not be enough to pay for his promises," writes City Journal's Nicole Gelinas.

If you just dropped into New York last Tuesday during Mamdani’s City Hall presentation of his inaugural $127 billion budget for 2027, whose fiscal year starts in July, you’d think New York was undergoing a cataclysmic recession or even depression, or that it was the victim of years of willful fiscal deception. The mayor used the word “crisis” 37 times as he spoke to reporters; he even put the word in red ink for his slide show. “The city is facing a significant fiscal crisis, the likes of which we have not seen in a long time,” he intoned. New York has “a historic deficit, larger even than those faced during the Great Recession.”

Delayed until at least the late spring are the mayor’s plans for free buses and for a new, $1.1 billion-a-year Department of Community Safety to expand social services and replace some policing. Instead, the mayor said, “to balance the budget as required by law, our preliminary budget takes the only path within our control.” As a “last resort,” he said, the city “would have to raise property taxes,” for the first time since the early Bloomberg era, when New York was recovering from the burst tech bubble and 9/11. Mamdani would do this despite never hinting at it during the campaign or during his first weeks as mayor, and even though, as he acknowledged, the taxes would hit households making a median income of $122,000 annually. “We would also be forced to raid our reserves,” he added.

"Mamdani’s gloom-and-doom theater doesn’t track with the city’s economy," writes Gelinas. The economy is growing, albeit sluggishly, and wages are up 7%. Still, those wages are not keeping pace with the rising cost of living, and job growth was an aenmic 0.9%.

Mamdani is pretending that the fiscal problems are a huge surprise and that it's not his fault anyway. The second part of that is mostly true, although how he wants to solve the budget shortfall should worry New Yorkers.

Taxing the rich may be politically palatable, but in the end, the city will probably lose revenue when, as expected, thousands of wealthy people head to New Jersey, Connecticut, or somewhere that's tax-friendlier (Texas? Florida?) to escape Mamdani's madness.

Mamdani has already canceled former Mayor Eric Adams's plan to hire 5,000 more police. They aren't needed, don't you see? This would allow Mamdani to establish his Orwellian "Department of Community Safety" right now. He's hoping that the extra savings will convince Hochul to allow him to provide "free buses." 

Hochul, up for re-election in November, has her own problems and fears a serious primary challenger on the far left. She is also a pragmatist and realizes that Mamdani is the wave of the future of her party. She magnanimously gave Mamdani a $1.5 billion gift to help New York City close its deficit, but was mum on any support for tax increases. She's suggesting that the city solve its own fiscal problems.

He didn’t take the hint. Because Mamdani is not getting his way, he is ratcheting up the volume of his tantrum: during his City Hall budget presentation last Tuesday, he darkly warned of the “two paths that we can walk,” implying that unless Albany opens the gate to the “first path” (raining taxes on the wealthy) it will be the fall guy for his massive property-tax hike, the only tax that the city government controls. To Mamdani, this hostage-taking has some logic: he wants to broaden the coalition of people advocating for tax hikes on the rich beyond his core base of democratic socialists and traditional lefties, to include working-class and middle-class homeowners and their city council members.

Historically, the working and middle classes have opposed all tax increases, even on the rich, realizing that the left usually ends up taxing everyone anyway.

That's what will happen in New York City. It's never going to be enough just to tax the rich. Eventually, the Democrats need more of other people's money to fund their agenda and end up taxing the not-so-rich.

The man who was all smiles during the campaign is showing a much different face to voters today. It's an ominous face, one that voters are not going to like if Mamdani gets his way.