New York City’s wealth-generating CEOs are not a problem for the city’s economy. Yet for the Big Apple’s ideologically Marxist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, these wealthy individuals serve as prime targets for vilification as he desperately seeks cash to finance his socialist pipe dream.
This in part explains Mamdani’s unashamed doxing of the city’s millionaires and billionaires with his pied-à-terre tax gambit. How dare one be wealthy enough to own a second home in the city that is responsible for billions of dollars in wealth generation not just for the city, state, and nation, but across the entire globe?
Never mind the reality of the capitalist free market system proving to be the greatest and most broadly distributing wealth-generating economic system to ever exist; Mamdani is too committed to his Marxist ideological agenda to care about the truth.
Indeed, his pied-à-terre tax scheme is just one of a growing number of tactics his team has devised to attack the city’s wealth and force his socialist wealth redistribution.
The New York Post reports that Mamdani’s office has created a taxpayer-funded digital influencer army running a smear campaign against CEOs of some of the city’s wealthiest companies and corporations.
One target of this smear campaign is Partnership for New York City’s new CEO, Steve Fulop. As the Post reports, “The operation, coordinated on Democratic Socialists of America Signal groups, aims to systematically tear down bigwigs as the mayor tries to close a fiscal gap that is projected to balloon to $13.2 billion by fiscal year 2028, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal monitor.”
Mamdani is pushing New York Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul, who is currently running for reelection, to support raising the state’s top marginal tax rate to the highest in the nation. Mamdani also wants to increase the top corporate tax rate from its current 7.25% to 11.5%.
Ostensibly, all this aims to generate revenue to cover the city’s projected $13.2 billion budget deficit, much of it thanks to Mamdani’s massive wealth-redistribution agenda, like free childcare, city-run grocery stores, and free public transportation, to name a few.
The irony, of course, is that if Mamdani succeeds in implementing these tax-the-rich schemes, it will ultimately produce an economic downturn for the city, shrinking the city’s economy and, in turn, tax revenue for all his socialist programs.
But the members of his inner circle directing this smear campaign are the director of the Office of Mass Engagement, Tascha Van Auken, a 50-year-old DSA organizer, and New Media and Cultural Communications Director Emilia Rowland, a 31-year-old former DNC press secretary who comes from a wealthy family and herself rakes in $175,000 annually. So the lack of economic realism is not surprising.
Mamdani’s smear campaign is a typical Marxist tactic. They know they can’t win the argument for their socialist economic agenda on the merits of real-world conditions, so instead they disingenuously attack the biggest wealth generators in a free-market economy as the problem.
Then, as these wealthy wealth generators flee these inherently unjust and unfair socialist economic policies, these Marxists further vilify them for leaving, for refusing to suffer under their abusive, ideologically imbecilic policies.
As JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned, “Individuals vote with their feet. You can already see a fairly large exodus of people and jobs out of some states with high taxes and high expenses.”
This is why Mamdani’s socialist agenda will ultimately fail, as evidenced by every other place it has been tried throughout history. At its foundation, the system rejects the core principle that people, free to express their God-given abilities and talents, will always outproduce people enslaved to a top-down system that continually robs them of the rewards of their labor on the grounds of an envy-based standard of “fairness.”
