Here is liberal CNN host Fareed Zakaria lambasting the idiot Mayor of NYC (who is a huge embarrassment to all Indian-Americans) for making the Big Apple even more unaffordable!
- lustylad
- 02-23-2026, 10:23 AM
- lustylad
- 02-23-2026, 10:28 AM
New Yorkers will pay for this
Instead of making government work, Mamdani plans to tax and spend his way to affordability.
February 20, 2026
Zohran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York City affordable. This week, he unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable.
New York has been fiscally profligate for so long that the headline number — $127 billion — produces little shock. But for perspective, these are similar to the annual expenditures of a midsize nation (with all the expenses a country requires) — like Greece or Thailand — devoted to governing one city.
New York City’s budget has ballooned in recent years. Mike Bloomberg’s last budget, adopted for fiscal 2014, totaled about $70 billion. In little more than a decade, the budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth.
And much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance: people. New York City’s population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5.3 percent decline from April 2020 to July 2022. More recent reports show a rebound, but the city remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024. The arithmetic is brutal: A larger bill is divided among fewer payers.
Per person, the imbalance is stark. Using the Lincoln Institute’s fiscally standardized numbers, New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles’s — and more than double Houston’s.
And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest district in the country. The city’s education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. It has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to more than $40 billion, with per-student spending projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal 2026 — among the highest in the nation. The outputs — graduation numbers, test scores and reading levels — are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does.
Now come the taxes — because every political argument in New York eventually ends up at the same curbside: Who will pay?
New York City already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum. For high earners, the combined state and city income tax rate reaches 14.776 percent. Add federal taxes, and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50 percent, reaching roughly 55 percent on certain investment income. New Yorkers pay tax rates comparable to those in European countries that provide, in return, universal health care, free college education and amazing infrastructure. New Yorkers get some 300 miles of sidewalk sheds and construction fences.
On business taxation, the city is also off the charts. The Citizens Budget Commission reports that New York City business activity faces the country’s highest combined marginal corporate tax rate — 17.44 percent once state, city and regional layers are stacked. Mamdani wants to hike income and corporate rates even further, or else he says he will raise property taxes by almost 10 percent. Property taxes already made up more than 27 percent of the costs of homeownership in the city as of 2022, above the national average.
New York is really the prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day.
Take Los Angeles — another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city’s homelessness budget for fiscal 2025-2026 totals about $950 million. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that in 2023 homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city, and a 2024 Associated Press account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015 (and 80 percent in the city) amid public frustration “despite billions spent.” An audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater and where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point.
What is the theory of good government here? If the answer is “keep adding programs,” the city will keep producing unaffordability — because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs.
Mamdani’s basic instinct is right. Focus on affordability, especially housing. But not by providing government subsidies — these only seem to have driven up the cost of rent, as subsidies naturally do. (The city’s rental-assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recent reported fiscal year. That is a fivefold increase in a handful of years — and housing costs only got worse.) Matt Yglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy — and routine — to build abundant market-rate housing. That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools and increase local GDP. And that will make the budget affordable.
Democrats in city halls can make the right choice: stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work — safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation and, above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live.
New York does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...bility-crisis/
Instead of making government work, Mamdani plans to tax and spend his way to affordability.
February 20, 2026
Zohran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York City affordable. This week, he unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable.
New York has been fiscally profligate for so long that the headline number — $127 billion — produces little shock. But for perspective, these are similar to the annual expenditures of a midsize nation (with all the expenses a country requires) — like Greece or Thailand — devoted to governing one city.
New York City’s budget has ballooned in recent years. Mike Bloomberg’s last budget, adopted for fiscal 2014, totaled about $70 billion. In little more than a decade, the budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth.
And much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance: people. New York City’s population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5.3 percent decline from April 2020 to July 2022. More recent reports show a rebound, but the city remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024. The arithmetic is brutal: A larger bill is divided among fewer payers.
Per person, the imbalance is stark. Using the Lincoln Institute’s fiscally standardized numbers, New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles’s — and more than double Houston’s.
And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest district in the country. The city’s education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. It has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to more than $40 billion, with per-student spending projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal 2026 — among the highest in the nation. The outputs — graduation numbers, test scores and reading levels — are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does.
Now come the taxes — because every political argument in New York eventually ends up at the same curbside: Who will pay?
New York City already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum. For high earners, the combined state and city income tax rate reaches 14.776 percent. Add federal taxes, and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50 percent, reaching roughly 55 percent on certain investment income. New Yorkers pay tax rates comparable to those in European countries that provide, in return, universal health care, free college education and amazing infrastructure. New Yorkers get some 300 miles of sidewalk sheds and construction fences.
On business taxation, the city is also off the charts. The Citizens Budget Commission reports that New York City business activity faces the country’s highest combined marginal corporate tax rate — 17.44 percent once state, city and regional layers are stacked. Mamdani wants to hike income and corporate rates even further, or else he says he will raise property taxes by almost 10 percent. Property taxes already made up more than 27 percent of the costs of homeownership in the city as of 2022, above the national average.
New York is really the prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day.
Take Los Angeles — another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city’s homelessness budget for fiscal 2025-2026 totals about $950 million. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that in 2023 homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city, and a 2024 Associated Press account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015 (and 80 percent in the city) amid public frustration “despite billions spent.” An audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater and where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point.
What is the theory of good government here? If the answer is “keep adding programs,” the city will keep producing unaffordability — because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs.
Mamdani’s basic instinct is right. Focus on affordability, especially housing. But not by providing government subsidies — these only seem to have driven up the cost of rent, as subsidies naturally do. (The city’s rental-assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recent reported fiscal year. That is a fivefold increase in a handful of years — and housing costs only got worse.) Matt Yglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy — and routine — to build abundant market-rate housing. That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools and increase local GDP. And that will make the budget affordable.
Democrats in city halls can make the right choice: stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work — safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation and, above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live.
New York does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...bility-crisis/
- rooster
- 02-23-2026, 02:09 PM
No one cares. Literally, no one. About either of these morons.
.
.
- lustylad
- 02-23-2026, 02:18 PM
You evidently care enough to insist no one cares, roo.
If you were playing warm-up band to the Allman Bros at the Fillmore East, and Zohran was trying to tax/confiscate half of your gig pay, then would you care?
If you were playing warm-up band to the Allman Bros at the Fillmore East, and Zohran was trying to tax/confiscate half of your gig pay, then would you care?
- rooster
- 02-23-2026, 02:40 PM
Let me re-phrase: I don't know why you would care.
Or anyone else here.
About either of those two idiots. Or NYC in general.
Thinking that the average person participating in these forums does is laughable. The only reason anyone claims that they do is to promote more divisive bullshit.
But we'll see how the thread goes, right? Tiny might give a shit, one or 2 others. But just as likely is someone who hates everything NYC stands for will lament about how Mamdani "destroyed that golden bastion of civilization"....
.
Or anyone else here.
About either of those two idiots. Or NYC in general.
Thinking that the average person participating in these forums does is laughable. The only reason anyone claims that they do is to promote more divisive bullshit.
But we'll see how the thread goes, right? Tiny might give a shit, one or 2 others. But just as likely is someone who hates everything NYC stands for will lament about how Mamdani "destroyed that golden bastion of civilization"....
.
- txdot-guy
- 02-23-2026, 03:13 PM
Thinking that the average person participating in these forums does is laughable. The only reason anyone claims that they do is to promote more divisive bullshit.Talking politics is always divisive. But at least LustyLad’s argument is based on some kind of logic rather than racism or islamophobia.
But we'll see how the thread goes, right? Tiny might give a shit, one or 2 others. But just as likely is someone who hates everything NYC stands for will lament about how Mamdani "destroyed that golden bastion of civilization"....
. Originally Posted by rooster
But give it a minute and I’m sure someone will chime in with something fairly egregious.
- elghund
- 02-23-2026, 03:18 PM
The guy has been in office less than 2 months. Nothing in any government gets fixed that fast.
A year from now, we will have a better idea if his ideas work.
elg…
A year from now, we will have a better idea if his ideas work.
elg…
- TechPapi
- 02-23-2026, 03:19 PM
Let me re-phrase: I don't know why you would care.
Or anyone else here.
About either of those two idiots. Or NYC in general.
Thinking that the average person participating in these forums does is laughable. The only reason anyone claims that they do is to promote more divisive bullshit.
But we'll see how the thread goes, right? Tiny might give a shit, one or 2 others. But just as likely is someone who hates everything NYC stands for will lament about how Mamdani "destroyed that golden bastion of civilization"....
. Originally Posted by rooster
This is what I don't get. Why do the maggies get so breathless when a liberal goes after a liberal, but if a conservative goes after the orange cunt, it's a big nothing burger? Those precious little maggie noggins are just full of broken glass.
- CPT Savajo
- 02-23-2026, 04:17 PM
- CPT Savajo
- 02-23-2026, 04:25 PM
Absolutely Democrats don't see eye to eye with Mayor Mamdani. Democrats are quickly learning to hate Mamdani, especially in NYC. I can't blame them. Everything Mamdani promised he's already walking back on it. Mamdani is just another lying politician. Residents of NYC should recall Mamdani immediately!
The Democrats in NYC canceled Mayor Adams as he basically ended his political career and now Mamdani is fucking things up. NYC needs an enema!
The Democrats in NYC canceled Mayor Adams as he basically ended his political career and now Mamdani is fucking things up. NYC needs an enema!
- elghund
- 02-23-2026, 05:53 PM
Absolutely Democrats don't see eye to eye with Mayor Mamdani. Democrats are quickly learning to hate Mamdani, especially in NYC. I can't blame them. Everything Mamdani promised he's already walking back on it. Mamdani is just another lying politician. Residents of NYC should recall Mamdani immediately!Newsweek 2-5-26:
The Democrats in NYC canceled Mayor Adams as he basically ended his political career and now Mamdani is fucking things up. NYC needs an enema! Originally Posted by CPT Savajo
“Zohran Mamdani’s Popularity Hits New High—Poll”
https://www.newsweek.com/zohran-mamd...hpoll-11461031
Google AI:
“ AI Overview
As of early 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a strong 48-32% favorability rating, marking a peak in his popularity, the Siena Research Institute reported on Feb. 3, 2026. This high standing follows his landslide 2025 election victory, with support from 64% of Democrats and 43% of independents.
Siena Research Institute
Siena Research Institute
Key 2026 Approval Details:
Approval Trends: The 48% favorability rating in February 2026 is an increase from 46% in December 2025.
Partisan Breakdown: He is viewed favorably by 64% of Democrats and 43% of independents, but holds a 68% unfavorable rating among Republicans”
Not seeing the hate you try to say is there…….
elg…
- CPT Savajo
- 02-23-2026, 06:29 PM
Newsweek 2-5-26:Newsweek and google AI are not credible sources. Many Demoturds in nyc do not like Mamdani.
“Zohran Mamdani’s Popularity Hits New High—Poll”
https://www.newsweek.com/zohran-mamd...hpoll-11461031
Google AI:
“ AI Overview
As of early 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a strong 48-32% favorability rating, marking a peak in his popularity, the Siena Research Institute reported on Feb. 3, 2026. This high standing follows his landslide 2025 election victory, with support from 64% of Democrats and 43% of independents.
Siena Research Institute
Siena Research Institute
Key 2026 Approval Details:
Approval Trends: The 48% favorability rating in February 2026 is an increase from 46% in December 2025.
Partisan Breakdown: He is viewed favorably by 64% of Democrats and 43% of independents, but holds a 68% unfavorable rating among Republicans”
Not seeing the hate you try to say is there…….
elg… Originally Posted by elghund
- txdot-guy
- 02-23-2026, 07:20 PM
According to the article the budget for NYC is 127 billion. The population of NYC is estimated at 8.5 million.
That means that each person in the city would need to pony up about 15,000 dollars each in taxes to pay the budget in full.
The median age in New York is 39.6, as per 2019-2023 ACS 5 Year Estimates.
17.10% were under the age of 15,
19.53% aged 15 to 29,
45.96% aged 30 to 64,
15.19% aged 65 to 84,
2.22% were 85 years of age and older.
NYC has a property tax, a sales tax of 8.875 percent and an income tax of 3.078% to 3.876%.
On top of that residents of NYC are also paying a state income tax of 4% to 10.9% depending upon income and filing status.
There is a reason people are leaving the city and it’s because it’s not affordable unless you are making a generous amount and can afford the cost of the tax base. Unfortunately as people leave the city just gets more unaffordable. I’m not sure more affordable housing is going to do the trick. For long term survival I think they need to concentrate on reforming their public transit system and make commuting into and out of the city as speedy and affordable as possible and concentrate on creating more affordable housing outside the city in the burbs.
That means that each person in the city would need to pony up about 15,000 dollars each in taxes to pay the budget in full.
The median age in New York is 39.6, as per 2019-2023 ACS 5 Year Estimates.
17.10% were under the age of 15,
19.53% aged 15 to 29,
45.96% aged 30 to 64,
15.19% aged 65 to 84,
2.22% were 85 years of age and older.
NYC has a property tax, a sales tax of 8.875 percent and an income tax of 3.078% to 3.876%.
On top of that residents of NYC are also paying a state income tax of 4% to 10.9% depending upon income and filing status.
There is a reason people are leaving the city and it’s because it’s not affordable unless you are making a generous amount and can afford the cost of the tax base. Unfortunately as people leave the city just gets more unaffordable. I’m not sure more affordable housing is going to do the trick. For long term survival I think they need to concentrate on reforming their public transit system and make commuting into and out of the city as speedy and affordable as possible and concentrate on creating more affordable housing outside the city in the burbs.
- Precious_b
- 02-23-2026, 08:01 PM
The answer is just an election away.
Ima surprised how many maggies like CNN.
Just as much as the subject of this thread
Ima surprised how many maggies like CNN.
Just as much as the subject of this thread
- lustylad
- 02-23-2026, 08:01 PM
This is what I don't get. Why do the maggies get so breathless when a liberal goes after a liberal... Originally Posted by TechPapiThis is what I don't get - why do you view everything in terms of us versus them? My team versus the "maggies"? Why not try to listen to everyone carefully and objectively, then pick & choose the best ideas from both sides?
Do I sound "breathless"? The only reason I'm encouraged that a liberal named Fareed Zakaria is delivering this message is because it means his fellow libs might actually listen for a change! Instead of unthinkingly dismissing the source and railing against so-called "maggies".