So there was smiling communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holding a press conference surrounded by his Marxist comrades, bragging about a so-called turnaround that his socialist policies have put in place for the Big Apple.
He claimed that his ideas of taxing the rich helped solve the mess that the capitalists laid in his lap. And then he had the nerve to claim that his actions were responsible for lowering the crime rate.
Let’s look at the facts.
Mamdani got by this fiscal year for reasons that had nothing to do with his self-proclaimed fiscal acumen. First off, he engaged in the enormously irresponsible practice of borrowing for the city’s pension debt. (This option is sometimes utilized in desperate times, such as after the World Trade Center economic collapse or the real estate crash in 2007, but not when revenues are flowing in from Wall Street, as was the case for Mamdani.)
If anyone is old enough to remember the near-bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s, it was due to the fact that the city’s liberal leadership refused to rein in spending and just kept paying for things on the credit card. It led to the imposition of a state-imposed financial control board that had to mandate spending controls and rip up their wasteful public contracts.
Mamdani is going down the same dangerous road, but instead of the mainstream media calling him out on these reckless policies, they let him make his outlandish statements with no pushback.
The budget in New York City was a mere $93 billion in 2019. Today’s $126 billion budget is bigger than the entire state of Florida (yet Florida’s students perform better than New York’s). Mamdani came into office begging the state to bail him out, and Governor Kathy Hochul, who needs his leftist support for reelection this November, was happy to oblige. She made taxpayers around New York State pony up $8 billion to bail out the city. The problem is that it was a one-shot, and the structural imbalance in Mamdani’s budget was not addressed.
He refused to cut anything in this bloated budget, other than money for law enforcement, canceling the hiring of 580 additional police officers.
His claim that taxing the rich solved the city’s problems is pure fantasy. His signature tax increase was a tax on homes over the value of $5 million owned by non-city residents. But that law only passed in June and has yet to bring in the revenues he is predicting. (They are not likely to materialize in any event since many of the billionaires will move out of the city, and even the amount he predicts is a drop in the bucket for what’s needed.)
And when it comes to the police, Mamdani shamelessly has tried to take credit for a recent drop in crime. That drop is due to a number of reasons that have nothing to do with the newly minted mayor, who took office only six months ago.
The one wise decision Mamdani made was to keep the very professional police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, on board. Before this mayor came to office, Tisch had reintroduced a number of proven crime-fighting techniques that were in place in the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, including COMPstat, which tracks crimes in their infancy in various precincts.
But perhaps the biggest impact on the drop in crime in New York City, and in fact throughout the whole nation, was the federal government’s crackdown over the last year on violent illegal aliens. You can follow the graph showing the crime rate and the number of deportations.
As Trump‘s deportations, both voluntary and court-ordered, accelerated, so did the drop in crime. There’s no other logical reason for this decrease nationwide. The immigration crackdown is the one constant that is in every state and city over the last year, proving the drop in crime was not limited to New York City. It was almost everywhere throughout the nation, including Washington, D.C., where the feds poured officers and prosecutors into the streets, resulting in an astonishing 50% decline in murders.
So, Mr. Socialist, neither the drop in crime nor the enhanced budget revenues had anything to do with your policies. The likely outcome over time will be another potential collapse of the city’s finances due to your reckless borrowing and Albany-derived one-shots. And just as in the de Blasio administration, your foolish law-enforcement policies will, over the next few years, lead to the inevitable resurrection of high crime numbers.
We’ve been down this road before with attacks on the police department and reckless borrowing. It doesn’t end well, no matter how much you try to sugarcoat it and twist the narrative.