Soaking the rich as Mamdani and other lefties want wont pay for a supersized NYC govt

Mayoral candidate and Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani vaulted into contention in this month’s Democratic primary by pledging to supersize city government.“He knows exactly how to pay for it, too,” his campaign brags.Does he, though?Mamdani’s platform — free child care, more public housing and an end to bus fares or CUNY tuition, just to name a few — wouldn’t come cheap.New Yorkers can have all of it, he promises, for the bargain-basement price of $10 billion in new revenues — less than a tenth of the current city budget.Mamdani is very much lowballing his agenda’s price tag.

Yet even if he weren’t, he still wouldn’t likely be able to deliver.Most of his plans rely on a pair of tax hikes on corporations and millionaire earners, totaling $9 billion.He doesn’t have authority to implement either.Should his cocktail of social-media savvy and socialism land him in Gracie Mansion, he’d need Gov.

Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers to OK these “revenue raisers.”New York’s local governments, the city included, can’t set their own personal or business income-tax rates.Between the city’s 1975 brush with insolvency, and its more recent fiscal profligacy, that’s understandable.Here’s another good reason: Candidates sometimes don’t understand themselves how taxes work — and Mamdani is clearly one of them.Mamdani regularly compares the top state corporate tax rates of New York (7.25%) and New Jersey (11.5%).

These are essentially the state tax rates on businesses profits related to their activity in a state.Mamdani says he’d “match” New Jersey’s rate.On the one hand, that would be a windfall—for Albany, which collects the state corporate tax, not for New York City, where most is generated.Yet Mamdani doesn’t get that New York City’s biggest firms already pay far more than they would on the other side of the Hudson.Before anyone cuts a check to Albany, city businesses pay the Business Corporation Tax, at least 6.5%...