Like him or despise him, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a good politician. He’s young, charismatic, and has a high-wattage smile. This is why after passing a $126 billion “balanced” city budget, he can get away with saying things such as, “Socialists just solved years of Capitalist mismanagement.” He elaborated further on this theme:
Throughout this process I have been reminded of the words of the Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek, ‘if socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists,’” said Mr. Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor. “If these past months have shown us anything, it is that socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles.
Being that this is a pretty arrogant statement, it’s worth asking what, exactly, has Mamdani done that would allow him to pretend that passing a budget — one of the most basic requirements of governance — is both a triumphal victory and a rebuke of capitalism?
First, some basic facts about New York city’s latest budget — the city is spending $126 billion for a single fiscal year. The budget was only made possible by an $8 billion bailout from the state government and deferred pension payments. According to one New York city fiscal analyst who’s bending over backwards to be fair to Mamdani, this has prompted “concerns that the re-amortization [of pension payments] could set the city up for extraordinary problems. … The Mayor who offered a promise in his inaugural address to overcome every moment of fiscal challenge with ‘ambition, not austerity’ may well find himself in contradiction to that pledge.”
The budget is basically a hellbroth of fiscal time bombs and all kinds of deeply questionable priorities. The New York Times reports Mamdani and the city council president “fought until the final hours” over how to handle a city rental assistance program “whose parabolic cost growth caused widespread alarm.” The ultimate resolution of that dispute somehow “expands eligibility for the rental vouchers,” so I have my doubts the concerns about parabolic cost growth are over. And if you want to dig into the budget, there’s all kinds of things that reflect a bunch of insane priorities. For instance, the budget funnels $7 million to drag queen story hours and transgender programs, which as city councilwoman Vickie Paladino notes, is more than the budget spends on veterans’ services. Oh and after facing pressure from NYC’s Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s budget is defunding a promised increase in the city’s police force.
For comparison, the budget for the entire state of Florida, which has a population about three times New York City, is $114 billion. Further, the state’s most recent budget is actually spending slightly less than the previous year. And despite spending less money than New York City, Florida’s education system and services are superior to New York’s pretty much across the board.
I’m pretty sure the guy who’s been governor of Florida for the last eight years and the majority of the state legislature would undoubtedly consider themselves believers in capitalist principles. For one thing, Florida has no state income tax and so most of its revenue comes from taxes on economic activity in the state, which is booming in no small part because people and businesses are flocking to Florida. In the last decade, Florida gained $196 billion in net adjusted gross income (AGI), while New York state lost $111 billion in AGI. Just two counties in South Florida hoovered up $9 billion in income directly from people fleeing New York City in the last five years.
At least New York city did pass a balanced budget, but that’s not something Mamdani can take credit for. The city is required to pass balanced budgets as a result of the 1975 fiscal crisis. Per Wikipedia, which I am citing just because it is not exactly known for laundering right-wing opinions, the ’75 fiscal crisis was an outgrowth of a crisis from a decade earlier:
An earlier fiscal crisis in 1966 had prompted the city to enact Keynesian measures—i.e., increasing spending to spur economic activity. The city financed an extensive network of social safety nets, including free college at the City University of New York and low-cost transit. Previous attempts to reduce these benefits had resulted in riots, as in 1971, when residents of Brownsville, Brooklyn, rioted after hearing of a proposed 10% decrease to welfare benefits. … Another contributing factor were extensive benefits for municipal staff, which had been granted to various city government departments to avert further strikes. Municipal employment had increased over the years while employment in other sectors declined sharply, and “service, government, and financial” jobs made up 46% of the city’s total employment by 1968, up from 35% in 1950.
There were other contributing factors; obviously, the depressed national economic environment in the mid-70s didn’t help. But if the 1975 fiscal crisis was caused by the misguided belief that government spending could fix lackluster economic growth (a particular idea that Hayek, who won a Nobel Prize in economics back when it meant something, spent much of his career persuasively refuting), half of New York working for the city government while the private sector was shrinking, and an inability to cut overly generous social programs, this tells us one thing pretty clearly — the most dire economic problems in the city’s history, which still dictate how Mamdani governs, were directly caused by socialism.
But hey, Mamdani said socialism “solved years of Capitalist mismanagement” not decades, right? I still don’t know how that’s a credible assertion. Mamdani’s predecessor in Gracie Mansion was Eric Adams. Maybe a moderate-ish Democrat like Adams is the DSA’s version of a capitalist running-dog, but I don’t think that portrayal of Adams’ somewhat dysfunctional single-term in office survives contact with reality. Adams’ single largest budget challenge was the rapid increase in costs caused by President Biden leaving the border open, leading to a rapid influx of migrants in need of services from the city. The official NYC Democratic Socialist position on immigration is abolishing America’s border control agency, so I don’t think Mamdani can credibly blame Adams’ for “capitalist mismanagement,” when abolishing borders is a socialist idea.
The mayor prior to Adams, was Bill de Blasio, a self-described socialist, natch, who grew the city’s budget 35-40 percent over the course of his two-terms, more than doubling city spending in inflation adjusted terms relative to what it spent in 1980. The only reason why de Blasio didn’t create a full-on crisis of his own was the city was experiencing a massive economic boom throughout most of his tenure.
But by the end, the problems of de Blasio’s budget busting were all too obvious. He left office in 2021 in the middle of the COVID crash, and the city’s budget was in such bad shape it was “balanced” with such fiscal chicanery as funding permanent programs with temporary federal COVID stimulus spending. If Mamdani can claim this current budget substantially fixes the city’s woes — and you should have serious doubts it does — much of what he’s fixing here is not “capitalist mismanagement,” it’s the grossly irresponsible spending of the proud socialist mayor that ruled for most of the preceding decade.
Now let’s look at the last “capitalist” mayor of New York. Michael Bloomberg was a billionaire no less, and even once upon a time, a Republican. Bloomberg inherited a $6 billion budget deficit that, in fairness to Rudy Giuliani before him, was in no small part caused by the economic damage of 9/11. Despite being a greedy capitalist, somehow Bloomberg was also a very profligate spender who did not exactly force the city into austerity, increasing the city budget from about $42 billion to $72 billion. This included things such as 43% cumulative salary increase for teachers and many other things it’s hard to imagine socialists complaining about.
However, Bloomberg’s single biggest driver of costs was because drum roll please he actually funded the city’s ballooning pension plans, along with the health care and other generous benefits given to city employees. We’re six months into Mamdani’s grand socialist tenure and he’s already punting on this issue. And finally, despite the spending growth under his mayoralty, Bloomberg left with the fiscal house in order and de Blasio was the first New York mayor in decades who did not inherit a budget deficit. We’re clearing a low-bar, but of the mayors this century, the capitalist billionaire was far and away the most fiscally responsible.
Anyway, I don’t expect much of the media, but when Mamdani goes out of his way to crow about the superiority of socialism while insulting perhaps the most influential economist of the 20th century and blaming capitalists for the supposed offense of attempting to making money in a state that confiscates the most tax revenue per capita, well, some context is probably in order. It turns out budgets contain numbers and they are really easy to fact check.
Regardless, if this episode as any indication of what’s to come — Mamdani is going to continue to lie, and do so with impunity.
