{"id":202406,"date":"2026-04-19T07:33:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T07:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/202406\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T07:33:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T07:33:21","slug":"who-contributes-to-new-york-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/202406\/","title":{"rendered":"Who &#8216;Contributes&#8217; to New York City?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\tZohran Mamdani&#8217;s tax on second homes is likely to drive the biggest contributors out of New York<\/p>\n<p>\t\t<img width=\"736\" height=\"514\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/MixCollage-18-Apr-2026-11-38-AM-5815.jpg\" class=\"w-full wp-post-image\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\"  \/><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t(@NYCMayor X)\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>New York City&#8217;s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, posed on Manhattan&#8217;s Central Park South on Wednesday and gleefully announced his plan to tax pied-\u00e0-terres worth over $5 million.<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/NYCMayor\/status\/2044508902809628760?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">slickly produced video<\/a>, he bragged that he&#8217;s following through on his campaign promise to &#8220;tax the rich&#8221;\u2014specifically, those who &#8220;store their wealth in New York City real estate but who don&#8217;t actually live here,&#8221; which &#8220;hurts working New Yorkers&#8221; in ways he failed to specify.<\/p>\n<p>This naked class warfare\u2014rolled out theatrically at the foot of some of the city&#8217;s most expensive apartment buildings\u2014is of course a second tax imposed on people who already pay New York City&#8217;s exorbitant property taxes even as they take advantage of few city services. And the mayor, who has waved away scrutiny of his wife&#8217;s support for terrorism on social media, describing her as &#8220;a private citizen,&#8221; mockingly gestured skyward at the Manhattan home of an actual private citizen, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin.        <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;As mayor, I believe everyone has a role to play in contributing to our city,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And some a little bit more than others.&#8221; The implication, of course, is that the Florida-based Griffin and others like him aren&#8217;t contributing sufficiently to the city.<\/p>\n<p>Nonsense. These wealthy nonresidents have made enormous\u2014even historic\u2014gifts to America&#8217;s largest city. In Griffin&#8217;s case, his joint <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mskcc.org\/news-releases\/mskcc-announces-landmark-400-million-gift-from-kenneth-griffin-and-david-geffen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">$400 million donation<\/a> to Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2023\u2014made with California resident David Geffen\u2014is the largest single donation the cancer center has ever received. (Mamdani&#8217;s friends <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/opinion\/memorial-sloan-kettering-gaza-protest-new-york-e91d2810?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">spend their time<\/a> caterwauling outside the hospital protesting for Gaza.) Then there&#8217;s Griffin&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.nytimes.com\/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com\/2015\/12\/22\/40-million-moma-gift-from-kenneth-c-griffin-brings-naming-rights-to-johnson-wing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">$40 million to the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/science\/ken-griffin-apex-dinosaur-museum-natural-history-84f1cd09\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">$40 million to the Museum of Natural History<\/a>, and $15 million to the poverty-fighting Robin Hood Foundation. Sources tell us his gifts to city institutions total around $600 million. It&#8217;s not a government-funded grocery store, but it&#8217;s a little something. That&#8217;s not to mention that Griffin, whose Citadel and Citadel Securities together employ approximately 5,000 people, is currently building Midtown&#8217;s tallest skyscraper right on Park Ave., something a mayor with any understanding of how to help working people would be welcoming and celebrating.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;d be remiss if we didn&#8217;t mention that Mamdani also held a live event with Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz to celebrate his class warfare plan. Seated in front of a banner that read &#8220;Tax the Rich,&#8221; Stiglitz, the man who was at one point <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20140707045931\/https:\/\/www.bigspeak.com\/joseph-stiglitz.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">raking in over $40,000 for every speaking engagement<\/a> after writing The Price of Inequality and who <a href=\"https:\/\/washingtonian.com\/2011\/07\/14\/top-dc-divorce-lawyer-cleared-in-malpractice-suit\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">unsuccessfully<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.abajournal.com\/news\/article\/nobel_economist_says_lawyer_didnt_protect_his_prize_money\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">sued his own divorce attorney<\/a> for $1 million, in part for her failure to protect his hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nobel Prize winnings from his ex-wife, bemoaned the fact that the United States has &#8220;more inequality than any other advanced country in so many dimensions.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Griffin packed up and left high-tax, high-crime Chicago for his native Florida in 2022, citing the city&#8217;s left-wing governance, and he brought his company with him. There are only a few hundred Citadel workers left in Chicago. By contrast, Citadel still employs more than 2,000 people in New York. One has to wonder who told Mamdani that doxxing such a generous donor and employer\u2014who already pays more than $800,000 a year in New York property taxes on his pied-\u00e0-terre and is one of the top taxpayers in New York due to apportionment of income\u2014was a good idea.<\/p>\n<p>Griffin and the rest of the ultra-wealthy are mobile and resilient, and their patience with far-left politicians has limits. There&#8217;s nothing stopping him and others from doing the same in New York City, leaving a hole in the budget and the chill of collectivism in the rearview mirror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zohran Mamdani&#8217;s tax on second homes is likely to drive the biggest contributors out of New York (@NYCMayor&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[18649,9,24,55,54,56,61057,42101,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-202406","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-ken-griffin","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-city-news","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-tax-hikes","15":"tag-tax-the-rich","16":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}