Mayor Zohran Mamdani is making a show of cutting the budget, with videos of him looking for millions under sofa cushions.
He’s pretending he’s leaving no stone unturned to close a $5.4 billion budget gap.
Don’t buy it. These are token gestures meant to suggest the city has cut all it can, giving Albany cover to justify what he hopes comes next: Mamdani’s tax hikes on high earners and employers.
Sure, cutting low-value government spending deserves some credit, but the problem is that Mamdani’s savings are mostly speculative or trivial.
Even the largest cut so far, $100 million from removing ineligible health-care dependents, would only materialize if auditors find such dependents.
And even if he reaps all the $1.7 billion in savings that he’s seeking, it would still leave that $5.4 billion hole untouched.
In other words, his budget assumes those savings are real, even though they may never materialize, leaving not a $5.4 billion but a $7.1 billion gap.
Meanwhile, he’d be spending on things like a three-year, $1.86 billion, no-bid deal with the hotel industry to provide homeless shelters, including for migrants, who now have no time limit on their stay.
He somehow found another $260 million for a new “Mayor’s Office of Community Safety,” an office with just two staffers.
But don’t worry: He’s touting $20,000 scrimped from the taxi commission’s Slack subscription. Give me a break.
New York City can’t raise income or business taxes on its own, so he’s asking for a little help from his lefty friends in Albany.
With the nominal April 1 state-budget deadline about to pass, legislative leaders and Gov. Kathy Hochul will kick negotiations into high gear, including tax talk.
The Legislature’s one-house budget plans would add up to roughly $17.5 billion in new state spending in just the forthcoming fiscal year — despite a $20 billion structural deficit — according to a new Citizens Budget Commission report.
To pay for it, lawmakers are pushing aggressive tax hikes, including four higher city taxes straight from Mamdani’s wish list.
The Tax Foundation already ranks New York dead last in overall tax competitiveness among the states.
The Legislature’s proposed double-down on corporate taxes — literally, to a combined city-state rate about double New Jersey’s — will only push firms to scale back activity or avoid New York altogether.
Millionaire earners already face the highest state and local income-tax rates in the country.
As Manhattan Institute’s E.J. McMahon has shown recently, once federal deductions are factored in, New York’s combined marginal tax rate is higher than ever.
To her credit, Hochul gets this. This month, she told a crowd to bring back New York expats in Palm Beach, noting that the state’s tax base has been eroded.
She knows any new taxes will harm the state’s already flagging economy, dwarfing whatever good — if any — comes from Mamdani’s spending.
There’s more than enough room in the city budget to prevent tax hikes and impairments to existing services.
Yet Mamdani has tied himself in knots to avoid being labeled an austerity mayor.
He can’t bring himself to trim personnel costs — salaries, health benefits, pensions — that make up the largest share of the city budget. Hochul should make him.
The mayor hasn’t even started talking about a pause on hiring, much less cut some of the city’s 330,000 workers or use technology to make them more efficient.
Any tax increase, then, would effectively subsidize low-productivity jobs that would be first on the chopping block if the mayor had to make real cuts and use the city workforce in ways that deliver better public value.
If Hochul gives in now, it’ll take but a New York minute before the mayor comes back with his tin cup.
After all, Mamdani is asking for hikes that won’t even fund his expensive campaign promises like fare-free buses and universal child care.
Nor should City Council Speaker Julie Menin — who so far has shown admirable mettle against the mayor and his Democratic Socialists of America cronies — give in to his attempt to raid the rainy day fund or extort her into raising property taxes by 9.5%.
If Mamdani won’t make tradeoffs that bring spending in line the city’s already enormous revenues, at a time when there’s no recession or financial crisis, it’ll only make future budgets more unworkable — particularly those coming soon that’ll require billions for labor negotiations.
For the far left, of course, no amount of funding and no level of taxation are ever enough. They must be told no — over and over again.
Hochul and Menin can’t let Mamdani skip the hard parts of his job and force hardworking taxpayers to do the heavy lifting.
https://nypost.com/2026/03/29/opinion/the-not-so-hidden-agenda-behind-mamdanis-budget-bumbling/
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