Manufacture a Crisis. Raise Taxes. Repeat.
Zohran Mamdani does not need an excuse to grab your money—but he will always find a new one, and this week he got pretty creative.
Yesterday, the New York City mayor used the city’s deficit as justification for taxing the rich, while claiming that he wants to shift NYC’s “relationship to the state.” As it happens, Albany only exercised budgetary oversight of the city’s finances after Democratic mayors in the 1970s had wrecked the city budget.
In Mamdani’s world, the obvious way to fix deficits is not to spend less, but to tax people more. He even pushed NYC’s recent weather response as a rationale for taxing the wealthy, claiming that, “the city could start to get back on its feet…because we had a sanitation department that was staffed by thousands of people.”
Which raises an obvious question: how does Florida manage a pretty good sanitation department with a 0% state tax rate? The reality is that most of New York City’s money isn’t going toward picking up the garbage —but according to Mamdani, garbage pickup is the first thing that stops when the money stops flowing.
The goal for people like Zohran Mamdani is to make life unlivable; to blackmail your own citizens into giving you more of their money, and not for the basic things that any city ought to do, but for all the other crap. And then, the minute that you don't give them money, they take away the things the city ought to do and end up turning the place into a dumpster fire.
When Mamdani declared that NYC is in a “fiscal crisis at a scale greater than the Great Recession,” previous mayor Eric Adams ripped into him and rightfully so: “Here’s the part socialist hate saying out loud: “Free” is a lie. Every so-called free program comes with a price tag, and someone always pays for it.”
New York, you decided you wanted this guy, and now you got him.
The Daily Wire - Ben Shaprio