The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Brings Middle Class Tax Hikes
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is playing a high-stakes game with Governor Kathy Hochul, threatening big property tax hikes if she doesn’t allow him to tax the rich.
On January 2, the Zohran Mamdani revolution in New York City began with his inaugural promise to replace “rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” That’s about to manifest as much higher taxes on lower- and middle-class New Yorkers, which I doubt is going to give anyone warm fuzzies.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Indeed, New Yorkers should have known what was coming last summer before they chose a Muslim socialist as the Democrat mayoral nominee. They should have known last fall when most Americans were realizing why that race mattered to all of us. They should have known there would be problems when Mamdani’s inauguration featured a lack of food, bathrooms, and music.
Well, New Yorkers fooled around, and they’re about to find out the staggering cost of radical socialism.
Earlier this month, our Thomas Gallatin covered the deaths of numerous homeless people, arguably caused by Mamdani’s policies. His housing policies are a disaster, too, and they’re about to get worse.
“Property taxes would be raised by 9.5%,” the mayor announced in unveiling his 2027 budget plan. “This would effectively be a tax on working- and middle-class New Yorkers who have a median income of $122,000.”
Boy, that’s funny for a guy who favors the “abolition of private property.”
Mamdani says the city’s first property tax hike since 2003 is necessary to close a projected $5.4 billion deficit and achieve the required balanced budget. The New York Times says it “would affect more than 3 million single-family homes, co-ops and condos and over 100,000 commercial buildings.” On top of that, the mayor said, “The city would also take $980 million from its Rainy Day Fund and take $229 million from the Retiree Health Benefits Trust.”
His $127 billion budget proposal is a $5 billion increase over this year’s budget. He blames “years of fiscal mismanagement,” but the truth is that it costs an awful lot of taxpayer money to make big promises. For example, reports The Daily Wire, “Watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission reports more than $7 billion of taxpayer money has been spent to house and care for undocumented immigrants in New York City.” It’s a sanctuary city.
Mamdani planned to pay for these “free” services by gouging the “rich,” but New York Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul said she would not grant the required approval to raise those taxes. That left Mamdani with what he called the “last resort: balance the budget on the backs of working people using the only tools at the City’s disposal.”
“We do not want to have to turn to such drastic measures to balance our budget,” he said. “But faced with no other choice, we will be forced to.” He added that the only way out of this “budget crisis” was “structural changes in Albany or painful decisions of last resort.”
He seems to think he’s calling Hochul’s bluff.
“I’m not supportive of a property tax increase,” Hochul responded. “I don’t know that that’s necessary, but let’s find out what is really necessary to close that gap.”
Mamdani and New York City could — hear me out — spend less.
It’s a wild idea, I know, and it’s almost never tried by government do-gooders, but it just might work. They have until June 30 to figure it out.
Working New Yorkers, or any other American, for that matter, don’t get to take the bill for Democrat inflation and tax hikes to their employer for a matching 10% increase in pay. Yet Democrats rarely have qualms about giving us the bill for their promises.
And if Zohran Mamdani keeps this up, he’s going to win the Realtor of the Year Award in Florida.
