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Mamdani Launches His First Salvos in New York’s Fiscal Battle

The mayor, the governor, and the members of the city’s big-ticket tax base are all squaring off over prospective tax increases and service cuts.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani presents his preliminary city budget at a City Hall meeting.

Judging by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s performance in City Hall’s Blue Room on Wednesday, there are certain features of New York’s fiscal follies that have changed little during the last several decades.

“Over the last year, New York faced a historic fiscal crisis…” Although that sounds like Mamdani, who used the same phrase to describe the city’s current budget challenges, it was actually former Governor Basil Paterson averting doom back in 2009. When David Dinkins took office in 1990, he, too, inherited a fiscal crisis, as did Rudy Guiliani, who had to close a projected gap of $2.3 billion—out of a total of $31.6 billion—in his first year.

Viewed historically, especially in the context of a total budget of $127 billion, the city’s current $5.4 billion projected deficit—already down from the $12 billion announced a few weeks ago—looks less like a fiscal chasm and more like a pothole. Yet the demands of custom, when coupled with the young mayor’s evident wish to project the financial sobriety signalled by his dark suits and sombre neckties, meant that the press corps—and their readers, viewers and listeners—were again treated to the latest production in a kind of political theatre that never seems to go out of fashion.

The whole performance is perhaps best summed up by the phrase “or we’ll kill this dog,” an allusion to the classic 1973 cover of the National Lampoon, which threatened desperate measures “if you don’t buy this magazine.”

In Mamdani’s case, the threat was to raise the city’s property taxes—which as the mayor noted is the only significant municipal revenue source not subject to the dictates of Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature—by 9.5 percent above the current level if Albany continues to balk at the mayor’s preferred policy of a 2 percent increase in city income taxes for New Yorkers earning over $1 million a year and an increase in taxes on the city’s most profitable........

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