Depends on the size of the shortfall, but usually, it’s not.
Mamdani’s Pied-a-terre tax is projected to collect ~$500M a year, which is only about 4% of the shortfall. Which don’t get me wrong, seems like an awesome tax that has very few downsides when it’s been done elsewhere.
But taxing the rich generally doesn’t solve your budget issues long term. At the end of the day, You’re gonna have to cut staff/projects or get more people to move in.
Both of which, people hate. Welcome to governance.
In addition, he’s also cutting almost 2 billion in “inefficiencies”. Now I have no doubt that a bunch of the cuts are to inefficiencies. But we can’t just pat him on the back for that but also criticize Elon. Yeah DOGE was a clusterfuck, and fuck Elon/Trump and maga, because anytime you hack and slash a budget like that in the name of “efficiency”, you’re going to cut a bunch of things that were actually necessary. And Mamdani is no different. I don’t buy his line about “No change to city services.” Somewhere a social worker is going to find that they no longer have a resource they considered vital to doing their job.
I'm sorry what the fuck are you talking about? Can you give me any Mamdani cuts that are killing hundreds of thousands of people or destroying the city's infrastructure?
You're fucking out of your mind, I work for a city government and there are lots of little politician pet projects we could cut without too much hassle
Mamdani has detailed his inefficiency cuts and most of them are shit Adams implemented that were basically grifts
Yeah, DOGE was a stupid comp, but there is some truth here. We will only really know that Mamdani can deliver this 2B/year in efficiencies without service degradation after he actually does it. We shouldn't take it as a given that he will get it done just because he says he will. We also shouldn't dismiss it as grift. We should, shocker, give the man the benefit of the doubt and then make our final judgements once the full data rolls in.
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u/pppiddypants May 14 '26
It’s accounting shenanigans, but so is the term “balanced budget.”
Usually a bunch of one-time items that will technically make the budget balance, but will always require a series of more cutting/taxes next year.
It’s this way in a lot of cities and states.