Margaret Thatcher once said, “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money,” and New York City's new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is learning just how right she was, and New Yorkers are going to pay a hefty price for it.

On Tuesday, a mere two months after declaring he would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” Mamdani announced a $127 billion preliminary budget for fiscal year 2027, a $5 billion increase from the prior year, while simultaneously warning residents of "painful" tax hikes if state officials refused to bail him out to cover his socialist policies. 

“That’s a city budget bigger than the state budgets of 47 states. Even the state government of Florida (population 23 million) spends less than New York City’s,” explains The Washington Post editorial board. “And the state still managed to attract hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in recent years.”

“The reality is that The reality is that Americans may like the idea of ‘free’ stuff — it’s how socialists win elections — but they are less excited about having to pay for it” they continued. “They’re even less excited when they live in a state that ranks at the very bottom of the Tax Foundation’s State Tax Competitiveness Index.”

During a press conference earlier this week, Mamdani called on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to raise income taxes on the “ultra-wealthy” help fund his budget for New York City.

“The onus for resolving this crisis should not be placed on the backs of working and middle-class New Yorkers,” Mamdani said. “If we do not fix this structural imbalance and do not heed the calls of New Yorkers to raise taxes on the wealthy, this crisis will not disappear. It will simply return, year after year, forcing harder and harsher choices each time. And if we do not go down the first path, the city will be forced down a second, more harmful path. Faced with no other choice, the city would have to exercise the only revenue lever fully within our own control. We would have to raise property taxes.”

Hochul rejected the tax hike demand without hesitation, telling Mamdani to expand his "ridiculously low" proposed spending cuts instead. 

Mamdani has claimed his administration identified $1.7 billion in cuts. The Post's editorial board was not impressed, calling it a “laughable number.”

“The reality is that Mamdani is trying to expand a city government that already does way too much,” they argued. “ The city should provide basic services, such as law and order, but instead it pours billions into social spending like housing and health care.”

They even cited California as a cautionary tale, warning that in the Golden State, “a slew of billionaires are fleeing at the mere possibility of a wealth tax. They’ll avoid the wealth tax — and California will miss out on the billions that these individuals otherwise would have contributed before a wealth tax was even imposed.”

More experienced Democrats in New York understand this. Gov. Kathy Hochul, no one’s idea of a fiscal hawk, nevertheless instigated Mamdani’s tantrum by refusing to go along with more tax hikes. The city council speaker and comptroller also have sway and are skeptical of new taxes.

This week, it was revealed that acclaimed director and filmmaker Steven Spielberg officially became a New York resident on January 1, effectively avoiding the billionaire tax—though a representative for Spielberg and his wife Cate Capshaw claimed the move was to be closer to family.

Mamdani's pre-election promises — free buses, expanded child care, cash assistance, rental aid, and smaller class sizes for teachers' unions — were crowd-pleasers that earned him "tax the rich" chants at campaign rallies. The problem is that governing a city with a structural deficit requires something more than slogans. His preliminary budget now acknowledges a $5.4 billion shortfall for the current fiscal year, with projections that worsen over time. 

“No one in New York is ambitious enough to dramatically reshape city government, and residents either vote for class warfare or vote with their feet. A reckoning will have to come eventually. The question is how bad it gets before reality sets in,” the board concluded.

Ouch.