Proudly displayed in the window of my local Barnes and Noble are copies of a children’s book called Zohran Walks New York. It’s a graphic novel that shows our city’s new perma-grinning mayor meeting residents who are overwhelmingly happy to see him. A more instructive text for the children of Park Slope was tucked away in the corner of the basement: Animal Farm. I bought it for my 11-year-old daughter at the weekend. She’s into dystopian novels.
More people will become hooked on state benefits and more staff will be needed to shove piles of cash towards them
I thought of Orwell’s allegory of the Russian revolution this week when our mayor threatened to increase property tax to pay for his huge $127 billion budget. He says he will be left with no other choice if Governor Kathy Hochul refuses his plan to tax the rich, increasing income levies on the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
The most obvious way of raising money was ignored: cutting costs. Mamdani has never had a job outside the public sector – save for a brief career as a rapper – nor has he ever run a large organization. The state has always taken care of him. And he wants the same for you, comrade.
Orwell’s pig leader, Napoleon, would be proud of the way Mamdani has presented this: the mayor vs the rich. Good vs evil. New York City is to become a superstate, a bureaucracy that will give to the needy by taking from the undeserving. But middle-class New Yorkers will inevitably pick up the tab. Remember Boxer, Orwell’s carthorse? “I will always work harder,” he wheezes, before the pigs ship him off to a glue factory.
The size of Mamdani’s new state will be hard to roll back even if New Yorkers replace him in four years time. The mayor is proposing $2.3 billion more in rental-assistance and $1 billion in “cash assistance” benefits over the next two years. More people will become hooked on state benefits and more staff will be needed to shove piles of cash towards them.
The mayor intends to hire hundreds of lawyers to go after local businesses to “protect consumers” and wants another 50 Department of Finance auditors to “enhance” tax revenue collection. Small businesses, the engine of the New York economy, are going to be squeezed. He also plans to spend another $1.2 billion next year on immigration services, bringing the total cost to $10 billion for the city. “Islam is a religion built upon a narrative of migration,” Mamdani said at a recent inter-faith breakfast. More migrants will be welcomed, nevermind the cost to ordinary New Yorkers.
The two-out, one-in rule for new public sector hires is to be scrapped, so we can expect an explosion in payroll in the next decade. Meanwhile, he wants to cut the NYPD budget of $6.4 billion by $22 million which effectively cancels an order by his predecessor Eric Adams to hire 5,000 new police officers.
The mayor intends to hand the Department of Education $543 million without any requirement to improve grades, despite the fact schooling already accounts for 40 percent of city spending already. Poorer Republican states, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, spend far less on public schools and yet achieve better results than New York in math and reading. But good results aren’t Mamdani’s aim, the aim is to super size the state.
This is the “warmth of collectivism” that Mamdani warned us about in his bitingly cold inauguration speech. Like in Orwell’s tale, individual agency is being replaced by state control. Mamdani said he would “govern expansively and audaciously,” and he is. As well as the proposed property tax of 9.5 percent, Mamdani threatened to raid the rainy day fund and the retiree health benefits reserve. No one is safe in the face of the $5.4 billion revenue shortfall.
Former mayor Adams claims that Mamdani has manufactured the crisis and that he had, in fact, left the city in rude health with $8 billion in reserves. But Mamdani knows the people who voted for him aren’t the property owning class, they are the renter class, to whom a tax on the bourgeois might be quite appealing.
Economists and property experts are falling over themselves to point out that the mayor’s figures don’t add up. That by increasing property tax, rental prices will go up. And landlords will also have less money to spend on rent control properties, which will fall into even further despair. None of that matters. The point is audacious expansion.
Mamdani is building the People’s Republic of New York. Of course, Orwell’s tale does not have a happy ending – the pigs become indistinguishable from their human oppressors. The book is a warning to future generations about how populations are manipulated and revolutions sour. This generation of New Yorkers has failed to heed that message.
