The young, overeducated, underpaid, and disproportionately new arrivals that gave New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani his electoral margin of victory last November have no memory of how badly run and unlivable the city was before Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cleaned it up. Judging by Mamdani’s first budget proposal, however, they are about to experience ideologically driven mismanagement firsthand.
After promising an explosion of new spending on free buses, free child care, and lower rents, Mamdani unveiled his first budget this week, which is a $127 billion plan for a city of 8.5 million people. To put that in perspective, the state of Florida has a population almost three times that of New York City, 23 million, and manages to provide government services for $10 billion less, $117 billion, than the Big Apple does.
Mamdani’s budget includes more than $1 billion in new child care spending, including for pre-K and daycare programs, but it does not amount to the universal free child care plan he promised. The budget also includes multi-million dollar boosts for the “Commission on Racial Equity,” the “Commission on Gender Equity,” and the city’s “Climate Office,” while a planned 5,000-officer increase to the city’s police force was slashed entirely. So, more leftist nonsense and no more law enforcement.
Even with his deep cuts to public safety, Mamdani faced a $5.4 billion budget shortfall, which he proposes to fill first by raiding $1.2 billion from the city’s reserve fund and by raising property taxes throughout the city by 9.5%. Mamdani voters, who predominantly live in the outer borough neighborhoods and work in service industries, nonprofit organizations, and the media — people who Washington Examiner political guru Michael Barone dubbed the “barista proletariat” — may believe this tax won’t fall on them because they don’t own any property. However, property taxes are the single largest expense for housing providers in New York City, and the only way they can pay higher property taxes is by hiking rents.
Instead of lowering rents as he promised, one of Mandami’s first acts as mayor will be to raise rents on the voters who put him in office.
Mamdani says he would have much preferred to raise taxes on corporations and high-income earners, but he was blocked from doing so by Gov. Kathy Hochul. Considering how quickly the wealthy are fleeing California after the Service Employees International Union proposed a tax hike on billionaires that would drive down overall revenues, Mamdani should thank Hochul for preventing further damage to the city and state.
The real driver of New York’s budget shortfall is education spending. The city spends more than $42,000 on each student, the highest in the nation, which is only rising while enrollment in the city’s underperforming schools keeps falling.
Mamdani could close the budget gap by merging schools as enrollment shrinks. But New York City’s powerful teachers unions would not go along with a plan that cuts staff, so Mamdani’s budget proposal is that renters pay more to keep bad teachers in failing schools. In fact, his budget includes spending to hire more teachers to meet state law mandating caps on classroom sizes.
DEMOCRATS ARE OVERREACHING ON IMMIGRATION
The barista proletariat that elected the socialist Mamdani is largely the same group that first elected socialist Brandon Johnson to be mayor of Chicago in 2023. Johnson has been a total failure, failing to deliver the lower housing costs he promised with more public housing construction, relying on regressive fees to fund his spending priorities, and leaving Chicago’s public schools unreformed. Chicago’s residents are fleeing the city.
New York has suffered under left-wing leadership before. Now, those who put Mamdani in office are going to get the misery of socialist policies good and hard.