Zohran Mamdani won his bid to become New York City’s next mayor on Tuesday — and by Thursday, even The New York Times was admitting just how costly his agenda will be.
The paper broke down the numbers behind his socialist wish list, and the price tag is staggering. We’ll start with free child care:
The biggest plan, by far, is free universal child care. The city already offers free preschool for all 4-year-olds and many 3-year-olds. Expanding child care to infants and to toddlers under 3 would be a major challenge. Mr. Mamdani’s administration would have to create new day care facilities and hire scores of child care workers. Mr. Mamdani’s campaign estimated that this could cost $6 billion annually.
Mamdani’s proposed plan carries a staggering price tag — roughly equal to the entire annual budget of the NYPD, the largest police force in America. And that’s just an estimate. The truth is, no one really knows what his socialist wish list will cost taxpayers.
One left-wing group optimistically pegs the figure at around $2.5 billion per year for New York City alone. But broader estimates — projecting what it would cost to expand such a program statewide — range anywhere from $12.7 billion to a jaw-dropping $20 billion annually. Given that nearly half of New York State’s population lives within the city, Mamdani’s plan could realistically run between $6 and $9 billion a year.
Of course, that number depends on countless variables — including how much the city decides to pay the “caretakers” running these programs.
I’m no economist, but spending $6 billion a year — or more — just to generate $900 million in labor income doesn’t sound like a great deal for New York taxpayers. That’s not “investment”; that’s setting money on fire for the sake of ideology.
And beyond the financial insanity, nobody seems to be asking the obvious moral and developmental questions. Under Mamdani’s plan, infants could be dropped off for government care as early as six weeks old. Six weeks. For perspective, animal experts advise waiting at least 8 to 12 weeks before separating kittens from their mothers — and kittens mature a whole lot faster than human babies. What happens to those children emotionally, psychologically, and physically when government programs replace parental care so early?
Then there’s the health factor. Every parent knows the drill when the school year starts — kids start mingling, and suddenly every cold, flu, and mystery virus comes home. That’s tough enough on five-year-olds. But infants just weeks or months old? It’s a potential health nightmare.
At least his ‘free busses’ isn’t quite so pricey:
The campaign says this will cost less than $800 million annually. Last year, there were nearly 410 million bus trips. At a cost of $2.90 per fare, and factoring in 2024’s fare evasion rate of 48 percent among bus riders, it would cost more than $600 million to make buses free.
The cost could fluctuate depending on how many people take the bus. In 2019, a year when ridership was higher before the pandemic changed commuting habits, making buses free would have meant covering $900 million in bus fares.
Free buses will almost certainly increase ridership, which will raise the costs of operation and maintenance of buses. Also, Gov. Kathy Hochul isn’t on board with this scheme:
MTA CEO Janno Lieber has said the cost of free buses could start approaching $1 billion annually in the next several years.
According to the MTA’s website, the agency faces a $3 billion recurring budget shortfall when the federal aid it received during COVID runs out as “ridership isn’t projected to be back to pre-Covid levels in the foreseeable future.” Free buses could deepen that budget shortfall.
Where’s all the new money gonna come from, you ask? Why, ‘the rich,’ of course. Mamdani is a socialist, after all:
Mr. Mamdani wants to raise $9 billion dollars in new revenue by increasing income taxes for wealthy residents and corporate taxes on businesses — a contentious proposal that would require support from state lawmakers.
He also wants to streamline city contracts, hire more auditors to enforce the tax code and collect more fines — three measures that he says could raise an additional $1 billion per year. These changes would most likely need support from the City Council as part of the budget process.
Government doesn’t “raise” funds, by the way, they confiscate it – via taxes. And if he gets his way, New York City’s taxes and those of the state of New York will be about as high as federal taxes:
At an 11.5% rate—and assuming all corporate taxpayers were taxed at the highest rate—corporate tax revenue in the 2024 fiscal year would have reached $11.9 billion, a $4.4 billion increase in revenue. Mamdani’s platform doesn’t explain how corporate tax revenue raised at the state level would flow back to New York City.
For corporations that also are paying New York City’s corporate income tax of 8.85%, their city-and-state tax rate begins to approach the federal 21% corporate tax rate, Walczak said. Some companies also pay an MTA transportation surcharge.
And Mamdani wants a ‘millionaire’ tax on top of the corporate tax, because nothing says ‘we want to punish success’ like a millionaire tax:
New York City’s personal income tax system is relatively flat, but New York state’s income tax regime is more progressive than average, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, with the state’s top 1% income earners subject to a 13.5% tax. Mamdani’s proposal would make the combined city and state personal income tax rate the highest in the country for those earning a little over $1 million, according to E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute.
Add all this up and you’ve got two big problems staring New York in the face. First, it’s not even clear these tax hikes will raise enough money to pay for Mamdani’s socialist spending spree. Second, they’re basically an engraved invitation for businesses and high earners to pack up and leave.
Why would anyone choose to pay the highest taxes in the country just for the privilege of funding a utopian experiment that doesn’t work? In an era when white-collar professionals can work from anywhere, Mamdani’s plan isn’t just bad economics — it’s an open advertisement for Florida and Texas.
