On the menu today: The president’s State of the Union address is tonight; President Trump has already promised, “It’s going to be a long speech, because we have a lot to talk about.” As is now tradition, National Review will have a liveblog, which you can find on the homepage, probably a bit before the 9 p.m. scheduled start time.
You’ve probably heard of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. You may not have heard of Nicholas Bagley, the former chief legal counsel to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or former Biden administration official Robert Gordon. But the three men are sounding the alarm to their fellow Democrats, warning that the blue city and blue state model are failing to deliver promised improvements, driving cities into bankruptcy, and undermining the Democrats’ arguments against President Trump and the GOP. Read on.
Blue State Discontent
Something odd occurred on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN program Sunday. The usually mild-mannered left-of-center host tore into America’s bluest cities so thoroughly that even rival network Fox News Channel thought his comments were worth covering:
ZAKARIA: Last week, [New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani] unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable. New York has been fiscally profligate for so long that the headline number, $127 billion, produces little shock. But for perspective, these are similar to the annual expenditures of a mid-sized nation with all the expenses a country requires, like Greece or Thailand, devoted to governing one city.
New York City’s budget has ballooned in recent years. Michael Bloomberg’s last budget adopted for fiscal year 2014 totaled about $70 billion. So, in little more than a decade, the budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth. And much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance: people.
New York City’s population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5 percent decline from April 2020 to July 2022. More recent city reports show a rebound, but the city remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024.
The arithmetic is brutal. A larger bill is divided among fewer payers. Per person, the imbalance is stark. Using the Lincoln Institute’s fiscally standardized numbers, New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles, and more than double Houston.
And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest school district in the country. The city’s education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. The DOE budget has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to over $40 billion, while the DOE says per student spending is projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal year 2026, among the highest in the nation.
The outputs, graduation numbers, test scores, and reading levels, are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does.
Interruption from Jim: Zakaria is being pretty generous in his “at best middling” assessment of New York City schools: “Only 28 percent of NYC’s fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared with 31 percent nationally. In math, fourth-grade proficiency is 33 percent, behind the national average of 39 percent, while eighth-grade math proficiency is just 23 percent, well below the 28 percent national rate. NYC represents failures in effective accountability measures and evidence-based instructional models that could have improved student academic performance. NYC also reflects the broader systematic failures of bureaucratic governance in urban public schools.”
Zakaria continued:
Now come the taxes, because every political argument in New York eventually ends up at the same curbside: Who will pay? New York already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum. For high earners, the combined state plus city income tax reaches 14.776 percent. Add federal taxes and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50 percent, reaching roughly 55 percent on certain investment income.
Zakaria wasn’t just looking at New York:
New York is really a prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control. Promising more, spending more, delivering less, and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day.
Take Los Angeles, another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city’s homelessness budget for fiscal year 2025-26 totals about $950 million. The L.A. Homelessness Services Authority reported that in 2023, homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city. And a 2024 AP account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015, and 80 percent in the city.
All this amid public frustration despite billions spent. An audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater, where the pension promises are so large, that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point. . . .
For Democrats in city hall, there is a choice. Stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements and instead make government work: safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation and above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live.
New York City does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes.
The whole thing is worth watching.
Then Monday, in the op-ed page of the New York Times, University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley and Harvard University visiting fellow Robert Gordon warned that public-sector unions were steering Democratic governors and mayors onto a self-destructive path:
If blue-state governors and mayors want to get serious about delivering excellent public services, they will need to do more than battle billionaire elites or embrace abundant housing and energy.
They will have to push back against a core constituency within the Democratic Party that often makes government deliver less and cost more: unions representing teachers, police officers and transit workers. . . .
Consider Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois. A fearless opponent of Donald Trump, his bravery failed him when Chicago police and firefighter unions sought to raise pensions, often by thousands of dollars. Against the advice of civic and business leaders concerned about, as they put it, “grossly underfunded pensions,” Mr. Pritzker signed legislation that partly undid a 2010 attempt to rein in benefits for new employees.
The new law will cost the city $60 million next year — more than enough money to cover the city’s summer job program — before ballooning to $11 billion over three decades. Because of Illinois’s Constitution, the commitments cannot be reversed.
Hey, Pritzker’s running for president. He may be a billionaire, but he can’t afford to disappoint a public-sector union.
You often hear voices on the right arguing that today’s Democrats are dramatically different from those of ten or 20 years ago. There was a time not that long ago when Democratic elected officials did not want to be called “socialist.” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was a fairly obscure figure until his 2016 presidential campaign. The notion of an untested 34-year-old part-time state assemblyman becoming mayor of New York City was unthinkable in previous decades.
You can find a lot of criticism of Mike Bloomberg’s decisions as New York City mayor from the right, including on this website. But from the perspective of today, Bloomberg looks like Winston Churchill compared to his successors Bill de Blasio, Eric Adams, and Mamdani.
All of this is adding up to a crisis of faith in Democrats who can’t avert their eyes from the policies in place in America’s biggest cities.
If the blue city and blue state “models” work so well, a whole bunch of blue states shouldn’t keep losing population while a whole bunch of red states keep adding population. If the tax-and-spend progressivism is supposed to be so good for working people, why is California the most unaffordable state in the country? Why is a black child in Mississippi two and a half times as likely to be proficient in reading by fourth grade as a black child in California? Why are low-income children more likely to test proficient in reading in Mississippi or Louisiana than in California, Massachusetts, or New York?
If Democrats know what they’re doing, why do so few things work well within their jurisdictions? Why do people seem happier and thriving in those red states, run by Republicans who supposedly don’t believe in government’s ability to solve problems?
What we’re hearing from the likes of Zakaria, Bagley, and Gordon is centrist-y Democrats who care about the quality of government getting fed up with further-left Democrats who insist they must be judged on good intentions and the amount of money spent instead of the actual results of their policies. Hard-left mayors like Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and others are running their cities into the ground.
Each year, WalletHub crunches the data to rank America’s 148 largest cities to see how well run they are, calculating “a ‘quality of services’ score made up of 36 metrics grouped into six service categories, which are then measured against the city’s per-capita budget.” In the 2025 rankings, Chicago finished 136th out of 148, Los Angeles was 139th, Philadelphia was 144th, New York City was 145th, Detroit was 147th, and San Francisco finished dead last. America’s best-run city, according to these numbers? Provo, Utah.
Bass and Johnson are banking on their opposition to Trump to save them in their reelection bids. (There is an interesting contrast with other Democratic big-city mayors who still strongly disagree with the administration on most issues but have found areas of agreement, such as Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, and Memphis Mayor Paul Young.)
Many of the biggest names in this current generation of mayors and governors squandered their inheritance. The cities they took over weren’t perfect. But they had lower rates of crime because they had more cops on the streets and prosecutors who wanted to put criminals behind bars for a long time. They had fewer homeless on the streets, and you could take your kids downtown without much worry about being accosted by a person who was mentally ill or addicted to drugs. The previous generation of Democratic mayors knew that local businesses, large and small, were the geese that laid the golden eggs — lose them, and you lost the tax revenue that made so many city services possible.
These are the issues that the illustrious crowd over at City Journal have been writing about for decades, as well as my colleagues at NR, of course. But those progressive Democrats were certain that they knew better — and now millions of Americans live with the consequences.
ADDENDA: In case you missed it yesterday, the president reacted to the Supreme Court’s decision like an angry toddler, contending that two-thirds of the Court had been swayed by foreign influences.
. . . Over in that other Washington publication, a look at the golden opportunity for Colorado Republicans this year . . . and how they’re heading into primary season practicing one of their proudest traditions, intense infighting.
. . . A couple of pedantic readers objected to the headline of yesterday’s edition of the newsletter, arguing that the New Generation Cartel of Jalisco had not “set Mexico ablaze.” As of this writing, more than 70 people have been killed. Authorities say they cleared 252 cartel roadblocks on major roads. There is not yet a comprehensive list of how many vehicles and buildings have been destroyed in arson attacks, but it is considerable; 10,000 Mexican troops have been deployed into the streets. The U.S. embassy in Mexico lifted shelter-in-place advisories for some areas, but said, “U.S. government staff in Guadalajara (Jalisco), Puerto Vallarta (Jalisco/Nayarit), Ciudad Guzman (Jalisco), Tijuana (Baja California), Chiapas, and Michoacan are sheltering in place until all blockades are cleared, and we urge U.S. citizens to do the same.” That all seems pretty “ablaze”-y to me, no?
. . . Let the record show that I managed to get into and out of Ukraine three times, Taiwan, India, and Transnistria once each, and only had minor problems getting out of Syria. But Des Moines, Iowa and Denver, Colorado — those were the places my departure was delayed more than a day!