Truth be told, I thought it would take at least one budget cycle for our socialist boy-wonder mayor to implode in a sea of idiocy over how he plans to govern this city and how he intends to pay for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The fact that it\u2019s happening even before his first budget is finished \u2014 with an absurd debate over raising taxes on rich people who are already leaving the city in droves or socking it to working-class homeowners through higher property taxes<\/a> \u2014 is downright scary.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a big red warning sign that this mayor is so fundamentally unfit for the job of governing Gotham that Gov. Hochul<\/a> should remove him from office before he destroys what\u2019s left of the city\u2019s economy.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s not going to happen, of course, and not just because those emergency powers held by the governor have been invoked just once \u2014 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took steps to fire a corrupt mayor named Jimmy Walker<\/a> back in 1932.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hochul is also part of the problem we face here in the Big Apple and the rest of the state. <\/p>\n She may be talking a good game about cutting rather than raising taxes to preserve what\u2019s left of the city\u2019s economy that hasn\u2019t decamped to Florida for its sunny weather and low taxes. <\/p>\n \t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCharles Gasparino<\/p>\n Look deeper into her record and you can see that she\u2019s destined to fold.\u00a0<\/p>\n For years now, pols like Hochul and predecessor Andrew Cuomo<\/a> acquiesced to tax increases and ever larger spending plans, not to mention woke policies on policing that normalized the idiocy that Mamdani brings to the table: Free buses, free rents, free health care, free everything in a place that already gives away so much free stuff to the poor that working-class people can\u2019t afford the taxes to live here, and the rich are sick of footing the bill.\u00a0<\/p>\n And now the bill is coming due in spades. <\/p>\n Even if Mamdani gets none of what he wants, we don\u2019t have enough people paying into the system to support the size of government our one-party system produced, much less the socialism Mamdani has promised.\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m old enough to remember \u00adcovering the budgeting process under mayors David Dinkins<\/a> and Rudy Giuliani<\/a>. <\/p>\n Central to Giuliani\u2019s argument as he ran against Dinkins back in 1993 was fiscal mismanagement of the guy he wanted to replace in City Hall. <\/p>\n But as bad as Dinkins was, his last budget for the 1994 fiscal year totaled just $31 billion compared to the $27 billion budget during the last year of the Ed Koch<\/a> mayoralty.\u00a0<\/p>\n Remember Rudy\u2019s reign?\u00a0<\/p>\n Rudy largely held the line for his eight years in office, nearly matching Dinkins\u2019 budget to the dollar (his last totaled just $43 billion) despite a Wall Street boom that could have lured him into needless spending.<\/p>\n Instead, Mayor Rudy cut taxes and regulation and the city\u2019s economy prospered beyond the financial \u00adsector.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mike Bloomberg<\/a> came in on the heels of 9\/11, to a city in need of repair. <\/p>\n By the time he left office, the city\u2019s economy was back on firm footing even as his budget more than doubled to around $70 billion.\u00a0<\/p>\n