Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doubling down on his push to raise New Yorkers’ taxes — despite the governor’s refusal to include an increase in her proposed state budget. Kathy Hochul, after all, is up for re-election in November and hardly appears keen to run on a platform of higher taxes. Is Mr. Mamdani, with the far left of his party behind him, planning to bulldoze Mrs. Hochul on this head? It wouldn’t be the first time she’s caved to the left.Feature, say, Mrs. Hochul’s volte-face when it came to the congestion tolls imposed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on area motorists. The scheme to tax on cars entering lower Manhattan was designed to cover the budget shortfall caused by the MTA’s mismanagement. At first, she opposed the tax on motorists, despite pressure from the MTA, citing her “interactions with business owners and diner patrons,” reported the Times.Mrs. Hochul suggested that tolls’ backers “go to the next diner with me” and “watch the people come over and thank me” for blocking the tolls. The pressure from liberal activists did not relent, though, and a few months after the 2024 election, Mrs. Hochul changed her tune. The congestion tolls went up. Mrs. Hochul yielded to the far left, too, when she nominated a new chief judge of New York State after the independent-minded jurist Janet DiFiore was forced out.Mrs. Hochul first named a relative moderate, Judge Hector LaSalle, to lead the state’s highest tribunal, the Court of Appeals. He would have been the first Hispanic to lead the court. Yet Judge LaSalle rankled the leftists who control the state’s Senate. He was deemed, the Times reported, “too conservative and hostile to unions, abortion rights and other liberal values.” The nomination went down to defeat in a rebuke of Mrs. Hochul’s leadership at Albany.The nomination fight underscored the extent to which the left wing of Mrs. Hochul’s party calls the shots. This is the ideological milieu inhabited by, say, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Attorney General Letitia James. The left wing of the party was bolstered, too, by Mr. Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic primary last year over Mrs. Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, and Mr. Mamdani’s accession to the mayoralty.Mrs. Hochul’s late endorsement of Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral bid acknowledged the power of this “progressive” bloc. If she thought it would boost her standing on the left, she got a rude awakening at a campaign rally at Forest Hills when she made a surprise appearance. Far from voicing appreciation of her endorsement, Mr. Mamdani’s backers booed the governor. The Jacobins in the crowd drowned out her attempt to speak, shouting “tax the rich.”“Alright, I can hear you,” Mrs. Hochul conceded amid the jeering before Mr. Mamdani’s appearance on stage quelled the mob. The Marxist mayor and his camarilla could well have that episode in mind as Mr. Mamdani renews his push to raise taxes, which must be approved at Albany. The higher levies are needed, he warns, not only to advance his program of “free” benefits, but to close a $12 billion deficit in the city’s budget.The revenue gap “is at a scale that’s actually greater than what we saw here in New York City during the Great Recession,” laments Mr. Mamdani this morning. The mayor is less eager to trim the city’s bloated budget, as the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission suggests, than to extort more from overtaxed New Yorkers. Austerity would require discipline, though. Mr. Mamdani likely calculates that it will be easier to roll Mrs. Hochul.
