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For months, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been stuck in a hostile stand-off over taxes.
Mamdani ran on further taxing Gotham’s already well-soaked rich, but he’s struggled to deliver.
His efforts to hike taxes on high earners and corporations fell flat, and his fallback — a proposed property-tax increase across the five boroughs — found few backers in the Legislature and City Council.
Last month, though, Gov. Kathy Hochul stepped in to provide some respite, reviving a long-standing “pied-à-terre tax” proposal on New York City second homes worth more than $5 million.
Mamdani declared victory in a gloating video filmed in front of investor Ken Griffin’s apartment.
It was par for the course for a mayor who routinely casts small changes as big victories — a habit that characterizes both Mamdani and his voters, the downwardly mobile elites clamoring to be told they don’t have to try in order to succeed.
It’s a perverse politics all its own.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post. Adapted from a recent City Journal Substack piece.
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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