Shockingly, it doesn’t add up. Ryan Bourne goes through the details:
When asked how he’ll pay for all this, however, Mamdani says he’d raise $9 billion annually through a pair of tax hikes, which he insists most New Yorkers wouldn’t have to pay.
That’s because he thinks that businesses and the rich will foot the bill through $5 billion in revenues from higher corporate taxes and $4 billion from a 2 percent income tax surcharge on salaries over $1 million. Mamdani’s budget plan is just detailed enough to show that the math here doesn’t work, even if he did manage to get the state’s blessing for his proposals.