Zohran Mamdani’s appeal to what may be the hoariest gambit in the politicians’ playbook suggests he’s not even an especially innovative thinker.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s supporters like to say that their man is a “new type of politician,” perhaps because they’d never thought especially deeply about politics until quite recently. In fact, he’s a familiar and, in many ways, duplicative political figure. Indeed, Mamdani’s appeal to what may be the hoariest gambit in the politicians’ playbook suggests he’s not even an especially innovative thinker.
“New York City is facing a serious fiscal crisis,” the new mayor contended. “There is a massive fiscal deficit in our city’s budget to the tune of at least $12 billion. We did not arrive at this place by accident. 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.’”
So, the Big Apple is broke. What else is new? The city’s profligacy is an all but permanent feature of municipal government. Twelve billion is a hefty sum — heftier for sure than the $5.4 billion hole Bill de Blasio left for Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, despite the relative fiscal health in which Mike Bloomberg left the city. Mamdani could not have been ignorant of the city’s budget deficit when he embarked on his bid for the mayoralty. He certainly didn’t dwell on the city’s fiscal challenges when he promised residents free transportation and childcare services, a $30-per-hour minimum wage, and city-run grocery stores. But now that he’s in power, Gotham’s penury serves as a useful way to avoid having to make good on all those promises.
Addressing this crisis “means looking inward into savings and efficiencies,” he conceded. But it also “means raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and the most profitable corporations,” which Mamdani was planning to do anyway as long as Albany and Governor Kathy Hochul are content to squeeze the rest of the state to support New Yorkers’ lifestyle preferences. In the meantime, however, New Yorkers will have to moderate the sky-high expectations Mamdani set for himself during the campaign. His administration has already delayed the promised expansion of the city’s housing voucher program due to “fiscal strain.” There will be more delays to come.
Mamdani’s maneuver harkens back to Bill Clinton’s shock over the “unsettling revelation” that the budget deficit he inherited in 1993 would frustrate his ambitions. “We now can see the full magnitude of the debt we will inherit and the challenge that we must confront,” the incoming president confessed on the eve of his inauguration. But as the New York Times observed at the time, “The $68 billion discrepancy is far short of half the projected deficit.” Republicans were puzzled. That, they said, does not justify backing away from the deficit reduction initiatives to which Clinton committed himself on the campaign trail. Democrats were just as perplexed. Is that shortfall really enough to scuttle the education and health care spending, industrial subsidies and tax credits, and infrastructure “investments” on which he ran?
For a time, it was. And for Mamdani, it will be, too. But the mayor’s own commitment to profligate public policy does not strike the implicit contrast with his predecessor that he hoped to establish. “New Yorkers were not told the truth,” Mamdani said on Wednesday, “and now we are paying the price.” You can say that again, Mr. Mayor.