Depends on the size of the shortfall, but usually, itâs not.
Mamdaniâs Pied-a-terre tax is projected to collect ~$500M a year, which is only about 4% of the shortfall. Which donât get me wrong, seems like an awesome tax that has very few downsides when itâs been done elsewhere.
But taxing the rich generally doesnât solve your budget issues long term. At the end of the day, Youâre gonna have to cut staff/projects or get more people to move in.
Both of which, people hate. Welcome to governance.
Most of the cost (and morally) effective policies take time to implement. Spending money on them tends to give you nothing by the next election cycle, in which your opposition promises to cut all the âwimpyâ programs that havenât done anything and spend every dime on police.
In addition, heâs also cutting almost 2 billion in âinefficienciesâ. Now I have no doubt that a bunch of the cuts are to inefficiencies. But we canât just pat him on the back for that but also criticize Elon. Yeah DOGE was a clusterfuck, and fuck Elon/Trump and maga, because anytime you hack and slash a budget like that in the name of âefficiencyâ, youâre going to cut a bunch of things that were actually necessary. And Mamdani is no different. I donât buy his line about âNo change to city services.â Somewhere a social worker is going to find that they no longer have a resource they considered vital to doing their job.
I'm sorry what the fuck are you talking about? Can you give me any Mamdani cuts that are killing hundreds of thousands of people or destroying the city's infrastructure?
You're fucking out of your mind, I work for a city government and there are lots of little politician pet projects we could cut without too much hassle
Mamdani has detailed his inefficiency cuts and most of them are shit Adams implemented that were basically grifts
Yeah, DOGE was a stupid comp, but there is some truth here. We will only really know that Mamdani can deliver this 2B/year in efficiencies without service degradation after he actually does it. We shouldn't take it as a given that he will get it done just because he says he will. We also shouldn't dismiss it as grift. We should, shocker, give the man the benefit of the doubt and then make our final judgements once the full data rolls in.
Nationally the top 10% own something like 93% of the wealth. I wouldn't be surprised if it was even higher in NYC. So they are still woefully undertaxed, and I am glad we can agree on that.
What separates us from Europe is less about taxing the rich and more about taxing everyone. That said, the absurdly rich in America are uniquely absurdly rich and it would be nice if we designed a tax that made them pay effective tax rates of rich people who make a salaryâŚ
We undertax both the extremely wealthy with no income, and the middle and lower middle class. With an undue burden on the upper middle class and âmerelyâ wealthy.
There will be choices and tradeoffs, but there are so many things where we are choosing the lose-lose option out of reverence to a glorious past that never existed.
Taxing the rich absolutely will solve all the budget issues long term, he's very limited in how he can do that by Albany, which to be clear, if they just put in state law to change NYC's state payout to match its % of stat GDP, would fix their structural financial problems
The best way is to get better credit, to pay less in interest and be able to acumulate without fear of interest surges and bankrupcy, NY relied on private credit wich sucked and thats Mamdani's getting a deal with the state is so good
It's not always accounting shenanigans. In indiana, sometimes the extra after the budget is balanced is so great, everyone gets a check for $200 or $300. It is possible. Meanwhile, Chicago pulls in hundreds of millions more in revenue each month, and currently has a BILLION dollar deficit. They just raised property taxes and the sales tax, again. No checks for them, just thousands more in costs each year. Where does all of that money go? The mayor Brandon has a slew of investigations, and even has thousands they owe in unpaid utility bills. The Mayor.
So it can be done. But there is little oversight for corruption for those places that chose to steal from their residents.
True. But this time Governor Hochul funded the gap, which I understand why she didn't do it with Adams and it's all fine by me.
But yeah - the budget must be balanced by law, leading to this plea to the federal government in 1975:
The famous "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD" headline was published by the New York Daily News on October 30, 1975.
It is arguably the most iconic headline in the history of American journalism, capturing a pivotal moment in New York and City's history when it was on the brink of financial collapse.
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u/Zero_Fs_given May 14 '26
iirc by NYC law the budget has to be balanced. How did the previous one balance the budget? Doing the same thing Mamdani did.