{"id":792141,"date":"2026-05-12T23:35:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T23:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/792141\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T23:35:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T23:35:18","slug":"zohran-mamdanis-unbelievably-dishonest-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/792141\/","title":{"rendered":"Zohran Mamdani’s unbelievably dishonest budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Mamdani<\/a> spiked the ball Tuesday, as the city\u2019s budget crunch seemed to go away as quickly as it had appeared.<\/p>\n

He announced that Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers would dallop a few extra billion dollars on Gotham<\/a> over the next few years to patch up the city\u2019s suddenly balanced budget.<\/p>\n

But the mayor\u2019s revisionism, coupled with the slipshod manner in which the budget is being balanced, gives reason to worry that he will struggle to handle less avoidable fiscal challenges ahead.<\/p>\n

The mayor insists he \u201cuncovered\u201d a massive budget deficit upon taking office, a strange term to describe something that had been warned about for\u00a0the better part of a year, including by state comptroller Tom DiNapoli.<\/p>\n

New York City is now in its fourth year of spending more than it collects, and spending has far outpaced inflation for a decade.<\/p>\n

So instead of taking a scalpel to city agencies, the mayor took the train to Albany.<\/p>\n

Mamdani, to his credit, accepted lawmakers\u2019 offer to scale back or at least postpone a state edict, albeit one he supported, that\u2019s driving some of city\u2019s budget agita: a \u201cclass-size\u201d mandate enacted at the teachers\u2019 unions\u2019 behest, despite plummeting enrollment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Usually, cash-strapped mayors look for efficiencies by reforming or ending underperforming programs or freezing new hires. But that would be \u201causterity.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Mamdani\u2019s still accepting the false premise that we need more teachers, and he\u2019s counting on state taxpayers to pick up part of the cost in coming years.<\/p>\n

If anything, the DOE needs consolidation \u2014 as our colleague Danyela Souza Egorov argued this week<\/a> \u2014 rather than funding failing schools with declining enrollment.<\/p>\n

An estimated 134 city-run schools expect to have fewer than 150 students come autumn.<\/p>\n

About $850 million in hoped-for savings will come from claiming revenues the city is owed, managing overtime, and \u201cimproving the efficiency of public services.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s easier said than done.<\/p>\n

What happens when those collections don\u2019t materialize, or when the city needs more police shifts?<\/p>\n

The biggest chunk of \u201csavings\u201d is even less defensible.<\/p>\n

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Mamdani has reportedly gotten the governor and state lawmakers to agree to change the way New York City\u2019s under-funded public pension plans pay off debt they incurred a generation ago by making overly rosy assumptions about how their investments would perform.<\/p>\n

The city wants to reduce those debt payments and instead pay it off over a longer period, likely well into the 2040s \u2014 meaning tomorrow\u2019s workers will be taxed extra to pay for city services delivered before some of their parents were born.<\/p>\n

This is a one-time fix, if you can call it that, which the governor and the mayor are turning to outside of a recession or emergency.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t forget: A chunk of the city\u2019s budget gap disappeared in part because tax receipts, including those from Wall Street bonuses, came in higher than expected.<\/p>\n

What Mamdani is hailing as a triumph for democratic socialism amounts to a state bailout standing on a pension gimmick wearing a trenchcoat.<\/p>\n

Hochul has given him billions in direct funding, plus her blessing to punt costs almost a whole generation into the future.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s positioning the city for an even higher expense structure in later years \u2014 without a plan for paying for it.<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s not going to be able to lean on the governor forever.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s tax revenues are even more volatile than those of the city, because its tax code is even more dependent on the fluctuating incomes of high-earners and corporations.<\/p>\n

And the city\u2019s ability to count on revenues from those sources could be threatened by the mayor\u2019s affinity for making videos about them.<\/p>\n

Pension gimmicks and temporary fixes are no substitutes for the sort of spending prioritization that comes from proper management.<\/p>\n

Mamdani appears largely unwilling to confront what\u2019s causing the city\u2019s costs to spiral out of control.<\/p>\n

If he waits until it\u2019s too late, he won\u2019t just have to talk about austerity \u2014 he\u2019ll have to show it in practice.<\/p>\n

Ken Girardin and John Ketcham are fellows at the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Mamdani spiked the ball Tuesday, as the city\u2019s budget crunch seemed to go away as quickly as…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":792142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,31361,5371,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,64906,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,3642,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-792141","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-budgets","10":"tag-kathy-hochul","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-newyork","14":"tag-newyorkcity","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-opinion","18":"tag-tom-dinapoli","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa","25":"tag-wall-street","26":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116564232699854244","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}