Saying that there is a $12 billion hole in the city budget over the next two years, on Wednesday Mayor Mamdani was being transparently political in offering his mayoral campaign’s calls for twin tax hikes on the wealthiest individuals and on corporate filers before anything else. Only the next day did he even mention that he’s ordering agencies to find savings.
As is normal, he blamed his City Hall predecessor, Eric Adams, but weirdly he also blamed Andrew Cuomo who’s been gone from governor’s mansion for more than four years, but even weirder he didn’t blame Gov. Hochul, who is much more relevant, but he needs her.
Mamdani once said the higher personal income tax and corporate tax rate were needed for child care. But Hochul will fund child care without taxes. So Mamdani now has another reason for the two taxes. He wants to raise taxes for the sake of raising taxes.
Hochul is right to say “no way” and that the mayor is being political. He blundered in not at least including his savings initiative at the outset, which will have all city agencies name chief savings officers to investigate potential waste and improve performance.
If Mamdani is able through serious examination and focus on efficiencies and bang for buck reduce agency budgets without cutting services, then we’re all for it. It’s hardly a secret that many city functions happen glacially and ineffectively, and while there are some that might contend that the fix to everything is to spend more, in many cases one of the real solutions is indeed to spend less.
Bloated and deeply bureaucratic organizations tend to be great at incentivizing complacency, corruption and waste, so if Mamdani really can get them to do more with less, that’ll be a shining achievement indeed.
Still, we’re not so sure that these savings measures, robust as they might be, will close a $12 billion budget hole. For that, the mayor needs a more robust plan that will probably involve a mix of tightening up and increasing revenues. Fortunately, it seems at least some of that latter effort will be aided by higher-than-expected tax revenues from Wall Street bonuses, which helped boost state coffers, but that’ll only be one piece of the puzzle.
The other piece, the mayor insists, must be these higher taxes, something that Hochul has maintained since before Mamdani’s election was a nonstarter. She’s already managed to announce significant investment into her and Mamdani’s joint flagship proposal for universal child care without any tax hikes.
This is one plank on which the governor, now firmly in her own reelection season, is unlikely to budge, which means Mamdani has to make the decision of whether he wants to keep pushing what has so far been an important political ally in a direction she has said she will not go. We don’t think this is ultimately a useful fight; while it is a deeply held belief of Mamdani’s and he campaigned on it, carping on tax the rich isn’t going to get him anywhere.
Mamdani should be smarter. Everyone knows he wants higher taxes, but he should be setting it aside for now. By his full-fledged budget presentation due mid-next-month, he should come armed with a more fleshed out savings plan and more revenue ideas, sans taxes.
