Mamdani Ratchets Up Tax-the-rich Rhetoric As Hochul Launches Reelection Run

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani dialed up the pressure on Gov. Kathy Hochul to tax the rich Wednesday, exacerbating a source of tension between the two and inflaming a political vulnerability for the governor as she faces reelection.

To drive home his point, Mamdani held his first budget briefing just an hour before Hochul took the stage for her first campaign event — a move that ensured the governor’s soft launch would compete with media coverage of a popular budget ask she does not want to fulfill.

“We will meet this crisis with the bold solutions it demands,” Mamdani said during the City Hall briefing. “That means recalibrating the broken fiscal relationship between the state and the city. And it means the time has come to tax the richest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations.”

Mamdani’s case for doing so turned out to be far less clear than his ambition: How will his pressure campaign work, especially when he has to deliver a balanced budget proposal in just over two weeks? What does he need the money for exactly? What will he do to get his own fiscal house in order?

All those questions went largely unanswered during his turn at the Blue Room lectern, creating fodder for the governor’s team to rebuff his demands — at least for now.

Mamdani’s well-organized base is preparing to storm Albany to push for a tax increase on the wealthy, whether the mayor’s math adds up or not. And how the two executives handle that dynamic just weeks after they came out together with a politically advantageous child care announcement will set the tone for the next four years.

At her campaign event, Hochul downplayed the timing of the mayor’s announcement.

“We talked,” Hochul said. “I don't think it affects what I'm doing. I don't think it's the first time he’s said there should be taxes on the rich. I don't think that's a newsflash today.”

“He’ll do what he has to do. Mayors have their press events,” she added.

The governor has also argued that she’s increased funding to New York City in past budgets and the state is set to receive $17 billion in additional revenue this year, part of which will pay for the child care plan she announced with Mamdani earlier this month.

Mamdani, too, sought to publicly downplay any conflict between the two executives.

“I’ve been encouraged by our conversations with Gov. Hochul,” he said. “And I’ve been encouraged also by the relationship that we are building, which is a different kind of relationship than one that’s typically been the case between City Hall and Albany.”

His decision to formalize a tax-the-rich-push — with charts and graphs presented alongside his budget director and first deputy mayor — adds a new element to a disagreement that bodes poorly for the governor, though. His overarching message is broadly popular in the Big Apple — even if the mayor’s argument Wednesday relied on muddled logic.

Mamdani’s pitch at first appears simple: The city is facing a $12 billion budget gap over the next two fiscal years — thanks to the practices of his predecessor — and it can only be plugged with an emergency infusion of state funds.

“We did not arrive at this place by accident,” Mamdani said. “This crisis has a name and a chief architect, in the words of the Jackson Five: It's as easy as ABC. This is the Adams budget crisis.”

Former Mayor Eric Adams, who has denied culpability, indeed had a well-documented habit of lowballing expenses by hundreds of millions of dollars, allowing the city’s spending plan to appear balanced on paper when it was in fact in the red. But he also had a reputation as a hawk who enacted several rounds of cuts necessary to rightsize the budget.

Regardless, Mamdani’s argument to Hochul doesn’t exactly add up.

To start with, the gap is likely to be smaller than the number trotted out Wednesday. The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit that preaches sober budgeting practices, thinks it will be closer to $8 billion.

The mayor is required by law to release a balanced preliminary budget proposal by Feb. 17, and he has pledged to do so without any cuts to city services and without employing any of the budget gimmicks used by his predecessors. Yet all the mayor’s promises cannot be true at the same time.

If he does indeed balance the budget through savings, then he will have undercut his argument to Hochul that he needs a bailout.

In theory, Mamdani could include a line item in the coming budget earmarking billions of dollars in hoped-for Albany revenue as a type of IOU. That would allow Mamdani to release a technically balanced plan without cuts to services. Doing so would also prime him to put the onus on Hochul to deliver the money or risk service cuts.

But that would likely count as the kind of sleight of hand Mamdani has vowed to end.

The mayor’s office maintained state funding is essential to avoiding service cuts.

“If the state does not balance our fiscal relationship and raise taxes on the wealthiest amongst us, the only tools that leaves the city are the most painful ones,” spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement. “City Hall is looking to do everything we can so that we don’t end up in a place where those must be used.”

Groups like the Citizens Budget Commission, however, believe Mamdani should look at making government more efficient before asking the state for more cash.

“The Mayor rightly talked about improving efficiency and investigating every dollar. That should be the first order of business,” the organization's president, Andrew Rein, said in a statement. “So far, we have not heard about any systematic effort to get savings ideas from agencies. The City should spend the current $120 billion efficiently on the right programs before asking New Yorkers for more money.”