Mayor Zohran Mamdani gathered the City Hall press corps Wednesday to announce his supposed shock at discovering a $12 billion budget hole — a hole that anyone paying attention has been warning about for over a year.
In fact, former Mayor Eric Adams flagged this very problem back in 2023, at the height of the migrant crisis, when he warned the city was heading toward serious financial trouble.
Mamdani’s manufactured budget crisis — which he claims is even worse than the Great Recession — is not about fiscal responsibility. It is a political tool designed to build support for soaking-the-rich tax hikes to pay for the billions in new spending he promised on the campaign trail.
Or, if luck is on his side, it gives him a convenient excuse for failing to deliver those promises at all.
He’s trying to avoid a direct clash with Gov. Kathy Hochul, but he clearly wants his allies in the Legislature to pressure her into approving higher corporate and personal income taxes, despite her understanding that such moves could damage her reelection prospects.
We pointed out as far back as October that Mamdani had no real plan to pay for his headline-grabbing proposals — and barely bothered to calculate what they would truly cost.
Still, he did campaign openly on raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers to fund his roughly $10 billion wish list, even though city government has no authority to raise anything except property taxes.
So now comes the theater: pretending to “discover” that Adams — and somehow even Andrew Cuomo, who left office five years ago — set a budget-deficit trap for him.
Let’s remember that Mamdani and other progressives once mocked Adams for warning that “we are going to have to cut every service in this city” to deal with the cost of the migrant influx. Turns out Adams was right.
More nonsense follows, such as claiming it is unfair that the city only “gets back” 80% of the taxes New Yorkers send to Albany.
That is the very definition of progressive taxation — and socialism. Wealthier areas pay more to subsidize poorer ones, and New York City is wealthier than most of the rest of the state.
In a touch of irony, Mamdani’s hunt for spare change in the existing budget echoes the Trump administration’s DOGE-style efficiency drives. He is appointing departmental “chief savings officers” to hunt for waste and fraud.
Even more telling is what he refuses to mention: the massive cost of the state’s class-size law. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels just announced the city needs $602 million this year alone to hire 6,000 new teachers to meet that state mandate.
But Mamdani won’t criticize the United Federation of Teachers for pushing that law, nor Gov. Hochul for signing it over Adams’ objections.
Perhaps when the cameras are off, Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan will remind him of the wisdom of his former boss, the late Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver: budgeting sometimes means “taking something out of the basket and putting it back on the shelf, because you can’t afford it.”
We look forward to the day when Mamdani runs out of excuses and finally levels with voters about what governing in the real world actually means.
