POLITICS: In Albany’s tax-hike kabuki theater, the one sure thing is that regular New Yorkers will lose out in the end

Even with Gov. Kathy Hochul vowing to avoid any tax hikes (before the November election, anyway), the Legislature’s leaders and hard lefties are determined to try.

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins both plan to put tax-the-rich “revenue raisers” in their one-house budgets, roughly approximating Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s calls for higher top income tax rates as well as increased levies on corporations; we expect they’ll want statewide hikes since their spending dreams stretch far beyond the five boroughs.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s socialist comrades — Assemblywoman Diana Moreno and state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez — offer a bill to give him the power to hike city corporate taxes with a whopping 25% surcharge.

And Mamdani of course wants to hit Gotham with property tax hikes of nearly 10% if Albany doesn’t agree to his demand to raise the top combined income tax rate in the city to 22.48% (with federal taxes coming on top of that).

None of them will admit that all this would only add to the “affordability crisis” that Mamdani’s got the entire Democratic Party bewailing — even though that crisis is conspicuously worse in areas where dominant Democrats have already imposed higher rates.

As long as they can get bleed to the general public more, not a one of them really cares about the real-world results, nor how many people and employers they send fleeing to Florida, Texas and even New Jersey.

Hochul knows this thinking is toxic for New York’s future, and realizes that much of the statewide electorate is sick of it — so she’ll resist with an eye on winning re-election.

After that, who knows? She likes to spend big, too.

Then again, Heastie and Stewart-Cousins will surely demand other terrible policy changes as their price for going along with a no-tax-hikes-this-year final budget.

However the kabuki theater plays out this year, regular citizens will keep losing out year after year as long as New York remains a one-party state where the “moderate” left just compromises eternally with the full-on radicals.