Truth be told, I thought it would take at least one budget cycle for our socialist boy-wonder mayor to implode in a sea of idiocy over how he plans to govern this city and how he intends to pay for it.
The fact that it’s happening even before his first budget is finished — with an absurd debate over raising taxes on rich people who are already leaving the city in droves or socking it to working-class homeowners through higher property taxes — is downright scary.
It’s a big red warning sign that this mayor is so fundamentally unfit for the job of governing Gotham that Gov. Hochul should remove him from office before he destroys what’s left of the city’s economy.
That’s not going to happen, of course, and not just because those emergency powers held by the governor have been invoked just once — when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took steps to fire a corrupt mayor named Jimmy Walker back in 1932.
Hochul is also part of the problem we face here in the Big Apple and the rest of the state.
She may be talking a good game about cutting rather than raising taxes to preserve what’s left of the city’s economy that hasn’t decamped to Florida for its sunny weather and low taxes.
Look deeper into her record and you can see that she’s destined to fold.
For years now, pols like Hochul and predecessor Andrew Cuomo acquiesced to tax increases and ever larger spending plans, not to mention woke policies on policing that normalized the idiocy that Mamdani brings to the table: Free buses, free rents, free health care, free everything in a place that already gives away so much free stuff to the poor that working-class people can’t afford the taxes to live here, and the rich are sick of footing the bill.
And now the bill is coming due in spades.
Even if Mamdani gets none of what he wants, we don’t have enough people paying into the system to support the size of government our one-party system produced, much less the socialism Mamdani has promised.
I’m old enough to remember covering the budgeting process under mayors David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.
Central to Giuliani’s argument as he ran against Dinkins back in 1993 was fiscal mismanagement of the guy he wanted to replace in City Hall.
But as bad as Dinkins was, his last budget for the 1994 fiscal year totaled just $31 billion compared to the $27 billion budget during the last year of the Ed Koch mayoralty.
Remember Rudy’s reign?
Rudy largely held the line for his eight years in office, nearly matching Dinkins’ budget to the dollar (his last totaled just $43 billion) despite a Wall Street boom that could have lured him into needless spending.
Instead, Mayor Rudy cut taxes and regulation and the city’s economy prospered beyond the financial sector.
Mike Bloomberg came in on the heels of 9/11, to a city in need of repair.
By the time he left office, the city’s economy was back on firm footing even as his budget more than doubled to around $70 billion.
Then came our first socialist mayor, Bill de Blasio.
His far-left policies included lax policing, even more spending and attempts to raise taxes, a pre-Mamdani “millionaires tax” scheme that couldn’t get approved by then-Gov. Cuomo who — at least in this instance — sensibly saw the numbers of rich people and business leaving for Florida and said no way!
With the COVID lockdowns of 2020, the people who could leave the city did so, taking billions of dollars in tax revenue with them.
That would have put de Blasio’s final budget for fiscal 2022 — now growing to nearly $100 billion — in serious jeopardy of a deficit.
A legally mandated state takeover of the city’s finances potentially loomed.
Fortunately for Comrade Bill, he was bailed out by gazillions of dollars in federal COVID-relief funding and fat Wall Street bonus checks that left the budget mess to his successor.
Eric Adams came in as mayor promising to reverse the decay of the de Blasio years and return the city to some semblance of fiscal stability.
Thanks to his eventual appointment of Jessica Tisch as police commish, crime went down but the budget didn’t.
Its size grew to $118 billion despite the continued out-migration of taxpayers and an influx of poor immigrants tapping into the welfare state.
Another Wall Street boom delayed the inevitable fiscal collapse, and maybe our boy-socialist mayor will be bailed out by a roaring stock market as he seeks to take the budget to $127 billion — a 309.6% increase from Dinkins — paid for by even higher taxes on top of the astronomical levels already imposed.
But remember, Wall Street’s presence here has been diminished. The NYSE is now a TV studio, not a trading pit.
JPMorgan has more people in Texas than in the city it calls home.
Rich people like the low taxes of Florida; they’ll keep their apartments here but they are not changing back their residency, as far as I can tell.
Businesses are closing at a rapid clip,(5,000 in just a few months last year, according to the Economic Development Corp), while many more are not opening because they can’t afford to.
The fact that Mamdani doesn’t understand all of this is the reason you don’t elect as mayor a 34-year-old former lefty rapper with a degree in Africana Studies unless you actually think destroying what’s left of the city’s economy is a good thing.
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