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Mayor Zohran Mamdani assembled the City Hall press corps Wednesday to announce his shock at finding a $12 billion budget hole . . . that everyone worth his salt has been flagging for a year.
Heck, a hole that Mayor Eric Adams warned about in 2023 at the height of, and as a result of, the migrant crisis.
Mamdani’s pretend budget crisis (more threatening than the Great Recession, he claims) is designed purely to gin up support for soak-the-rich tax hikes to fund his promised billions in new spending.
(Or, if the city’s lucky enough, to give him an excuse for failing to deliver on his promises.)
He’s trying to avoid an outright break with Gov. Kathy Hochul, but wants his allies in the Legislature to bully her into OK’ing state corporate and personal-income tax hikes even though she knows that could threaten her re-election hopes.
We noted in October that Mamdani had no real plan to pay for his signature promises — much less how much they’d truly cost.
Then again, he did campaign on tax hikes on wealthy New Yorkers to fund his $10 billion freebie-filled agenda, though knowing full well that city government lacks the power to raise anything except property taxes.
So now comes the fakery of “discovering” that Adams (and, somehow, Andrew Cuomo, who left office five years ago) laid a budget-deficit trap for him.
Reminder: Mamdani and other progressives pilloried Adams for suggesting (years ago!) that “we are going to have to cut every service in this city” to cover the costs of the migrant influx.
More flim-flammery: Calling it unfair that the city only “gets back” 80% of the taxes New Yorkers pay to the state.
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D’oh! The essence of progressive taxation — and of socialism: The wealthy pay more (and NYC is wealthier than most of the state) to support the less well-off.
Comically, his bid to find some cash in the existing budget echoes Team Trump’s DOGE drive: He’s naming departmental “chief savings officers” to ID waste and fraud.
More hilarious, the new mayor is silent about the costs the state class-size law is inflicting on the city; schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels just announced he needs $602 million this year to hire 6,000 new teachers to meet that state mandate.
But Mamdani doesn’t want to call out the United Federation of Teachers for getting that law passed, nor Hochul for signing it over Adams’ objections.
When Mamdani’s away from the cameras, perhaps Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan will share the wisdom of his old boss, late Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver: Budgeting means that sometimes you just have to “take something out of the basket and put it back on the shelf, because you can’t afford it.”
We look forward to the day, once his pathetic excuses stop working, that the mayor has to level with his voters about living in the real world.