How Can Democrats Possibly Run On "Affordability"?

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How Can Democrats Possibly Run On "Affordability"?

  • We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.”

  • How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second.

  • The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.”

  • The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for dealing with the economy. The Democrats advocate for higher government spending, higher taxes, and more regulation of business; and the Republicans advocate for lower spending, lower taxes, and less regulation of business. The states are the “laboratories of democracy,” where we get to see the consequences of disparate policies play out, and to evaluate the results. Neither party is perfect in implementing what it advocates, so there are always some complexities. But in the main it is easy to collect data that give a relatively clear picture of the results of Democrat versus Republican policies.

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So How Is Zohran Mamdani's New Pied-à-Terre Tax Supposed To Work?

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So How Is Zohran Mamdani's New Pied-à-Terre Tax Supposed To Work?

  • Here in New York, we continue to wait for the announcement of the annual budget that was due on April 1. Negotiations among the Governor and legislative leaders continue, with one big open issue being the potential extension of the “net zero” deadlines of the Climate Act.

  • While many issues may remain open, one thing on which there appears to be agreement is what they are calling the “pied-à-terre” tax — a real estate tax surcharge on New York City apartments valued at $5 million and up that are owned by people who are not permanent residents of New York. We know that that tax is an agreed part of the budget package because Mayor Mamdani bragged about it in his cringey video of April 15, which I covered (and linked) in my April 17 post.

  • Both Mamdani and Governor Hochul have asserted that the new tax will raise approximately $500 million per year in new revenue for the City. However, neither Mamdani’s video nor anything else has disclosed the details of how this new tax will be implemented.

  • At first glance, implementation might seem easy.

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Zohran Mamdani Gets Positively Giddy About Taxing The Rich

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Zohran Mamdani Gets Positively Giddy About Taxing The Rich

  • Here in New York, our new Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran on a platform of “taxing the rich.”

  • But that leaves a question to which the answer up to now has not been completely clear: Does Mamdani advocate taxing the rich because he thinks it is good tax policy, or does he advocate taxing the rich as a way to take revenge and punish a group he thinks of as predators and oppressors?

  • Currently the New York Legislature and Governor are in the midst of their annual budget negotiations, in which one of the issues is whether Mamdani will be granted any of his “tax the rich” wishes. Word so far had been that the Governor has resisted those wishes, particularly the wish to increase the rates of income tax on high earners.

  • However, on tax day (April 15) news emerged that there is some kind of an agreement on one piece of Mamdani’s tax agenda, namely a proposal to impose a special tax or fee of some kind on expensive New York properties used by non-residents as second homes or “pieds-à-terre.”

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Dear Mayor Mamdani, Just Wondering, Are You Planning To Pay Your Own Millionaires' Tax?

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Dear Mayor Mamdani, Just Wondering, Are You Planning To Pay Your Own Millionaires' Tax?

  • Our new socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed many destructive initiatives. But if there is one that stands out above all the others as his signature issue, it is his plan to raise income taxes on the “ultra-wealthy,” which he has defined as those people earning $1 million of more per year.

  • The City of New York does not have the authority on its own to raise income tax rates, either at the State or City level, so he has requested that the State Legislature enact his proposed premium taxes on “millionaires.”

  • Here’s what I’m wondering: If the Legislature goes along with Mayor Mamdani’s request, does he plan to pay the new taxes himself?

  • We know the answer to that — of course he doesn’t intend to pay the premium “millionaire” rates. But why not?

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With Zohran Mamdani, Everything That Has Already Failed Is New Again

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With Zohran Mamdani, Everything That Has Already Failed Is New Again

  • Our newly-anointed Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, vows that he is a Socialist, and that he intends to implement an explicitly Socialist suite of policies. OK, the guy is only 34 years old. He was born on October 18, 1991, just a couple of months before the final collapse of the Soviet Union on the day after Christmas that year. He lacks the personal experience that we senior citizens have of reading every day for decades of the horrors of life in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, or Mao’s China. But could a student really learn so little in fancy schools like Bronx Science and Bowdoin College that he could graduate in the 2010s and not know about this history? Shockingly, yes.

  • So the “Socialist” policies advocated by Mamdani are different, more akin to the standard progressive playbook of a greatly expanded handout state financed by higher income taxes on the high earners. Of the various policies that Mamdani has advocated, the three that I think are most significant in their potential impact on the City are: (1) raising income taxes on high earners, (2) having the City as developer build 200,000 new publicly-owned “affordable” housing units, and (3) “defunding” and/or downsizing the police department.

  • To Mamdani and his twenty- and thirty-something acolytes, all this stuff seems so terribly new and fresh and creative. But the funny thing is that all of these policies have been tried before in New York. They were all implemented well before Mamdani was born, and then reversed by the time he was a little kid. In each case the reversal occurred because the policy had abjectly failed.

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Once Again, State Budget Time in New York And Florida

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Once Again, State Budget Time in New York And Florida

  • It is gratifying to see a few other commentators starting to notice the dramatic contrasts between New York and Florida in government spending and policy outcomes.

  • You may already be aware of the truly incredible difference in state government spending between New York and Florida.

  • But what you may not be aware of is the shocking lack of measurable benefit that New Yorkers get for all their extra spending.

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