New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, announced this week that he is making good on his campaign promise to tax the rich. Like all socialists, Mamdani claims that the rich do not pay their “fair share,” a claim contradicted by the data.
In effect, wealthy taxpayers pay almost all of the taxes in New York City, while the lower 50% not only pay almost nothing but also receive government benefits. The lower 30% of NYC residents do almost no work. This is supported by Census Bureau data showing that the lowest income quintile in New York City earns a mean household income of just$12,294, equivalent to roughly 14 hours per week at New York’sminimum wage of $16.50, which is already nearly double the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
According to theNew York State Department of Taxation and Finance, millionaires paid 44.6% of all personal income tax collected in tax year 2024, while the top 200,000 taxpayers paid 51.9%. Millionaires also accounted for over 75% of all reported capital gains in the state that year. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of taxpayers paid just 0.2%. According to2023 datafrom the NYC Independent Budget Office, the top 1% of city income tax filers paid approximately one-third of all city income tax revenue, with a threshold of at least $906,677 in income.
“When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich,” Mamdani declared in avideofilmed outside 220 Central Park South, where Citadel CEO Ken Griffin owns a four-floor penthouse purchased for $238 million. On April 15, Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul jointly announced a pied-à-terre tax, French for “foot on the ground,” an annual surcharge on one-to-three-family homes, condominiums, and co-ops valued above $5 million whose owners maintain a primary residence outside New York City.
Mamdani argued that such properties are often left vacant while still benefiting from rising real estate values, calling the arrangement “a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers.”
Yet the non-resident owners he targets are, by definition, not drawing on city services. The revenue he proposes to extract from them would flow not to working New Yorkers but to welfare programs serving those who don’t work, transferring wealth from tax producers to tax consumers.
“As mayor, I believe everyone has a role to play in contributing to our city,” Mamdani said, adding that “some, a little bit more than others.”
In practice, the $500 million he aims to collect would be extracted from a small number of wealthy property owners to fund services consumed by a far larger population that contributes little to the tax base. In Austrian economics, my academic discipline, this is calledwealth redistribution. It is a dangerous feature of socialism that begins the slide toward communism and the abolition of private property.
Mamdani explained that the projected $500 million in annual revenue taken from the wealthy will be directed toward free childcare, street cleaning, and neighborhood safety. But if he wanted safer neighborhoods, he could achieve that goal by arresting and prosecuting criminals, something he opposes.
According toManhattan Institutefellow Rafael Mangual, Mamdani won his assembly seat in 2020 as part of a far-left contingent for whom “defund the police” and “abolish jails” were core elements of political identity, not empty slogans. In a candidate questionnaire, he stated that his goal is to havefewer peopleincarcerated before trial and fewer prosecuted overall, and called violence an “artificial construction,” stating at a 2021 protest that “what violent crime is, is defined by the state.” As the endorsed candidate of the NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, he is tied to aplatformseeking to dismantle enforcement of all misdemeanor offenses, end cash bail, cut prosecutors’ budgets, and end imprisonment for parole violations.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
