By Ray Cardello for May 18, 2026, Season 35 / Post 27

New York City has gone far left and elected a self-proclaimed Socialist as Mayor. Zohran Mamdani has taken the reins of The Big Apple and is quickly watching it rot away. In five short months, Mamdani has done enough damage to the city that it will take decades to correct, if ever. We have witnessed prominent American cities decay under Democratic control, with Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles among the more notable. Yet, no one could have imagined someone pulling the greatest city in the world into the gutters so quickly. With a combination of bad policy and fiscal irresponsibility, he has exacerbated a fiscal crisis and held the city’s homeowners hostage, threatening them with a 10% property tax hike unless Governor Hochul cut NYC a check. He smiled, she blinked, and $4 Billion is coming to New York City from the hard-working people of the rest of the state. What makes this worse is that this has happened two years in a row, as people of Rochester, Albany, Buffalo, and Utica have dipped into their pockets and gifted Manhattan $8 Billion to cover political malfeasance.

New York City has an out-of-control annual budget of $124 Billion, which is more than the budgets of nearly every state in the country. Florida, for example, has a budget of only $115 billion, and the Sunshine State has no income tax. Mamdani, on the other hand, is looking for more ways to increase taxes on everything possible to fund his Socialist give-away programs like Free grocery stores, Free busing, Free community college, and Free daycare. These are Free to everyone except the wealthy, who, according to Mamdani, are not paying enough. The top 1% of New Yorkers already pay 45% of the budget. How much is enough for Socialists? There is no ceiling as they squeeze the wealthy for more and treat their wealth like that of convicted felons. Recent comments by Sandy Cortez claimed that people cannot earn a billion dollars unless they cheat the system, abuse their workers, and pay their help below living wages. Cortez wasted her money at Boston University and never learned a thing about capitalism or how it fueled America’s growth.

Mamdani has recently taken on Kenneth C. Griffin, the Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Chief Investment Officer of the global alternative investment firm Citadel LLC. This battle is not going well for Mamdani who is getting a master class in Capitalism from Griffin. Citadel had already moved much of its operation out of New York to Miami. They did have plans for a massive new facility in Manhattan that would have employed 6,000 construction workers and been the home for 15,000 new workers. But, Mamdani’s arrogance and ignorance may have turned out the lights on these 21,000 residents, just as Cortez did a few years ago when she chased Amazon out of her district.

New York is $12 billion short of covering its ridiculous budget and Mamdani is overturning every rock and sofa cushion to find the loose change to close the gap. He is borrowing from other programs, including deferring city obligations to the employees’ retirement fund. All he is doing is kicking the fiscal can down the road and risking the future financial status of every retired city worker.

We have to highlight the failures of Mayors Mamdani, Bass, and Johnson in the upcoming elections as a preview into all of America if we are foolish enough to keep electing these radical Democrats who are hell-bent on bringing their city, state, and country to its knees. We must do what our education system failed to do, and that is to show the perils of this road that the elite younger generation keeps voting for, and have no idea of the damage they are inflicting on America. What is worse is the thought that they do know, and this is a conscious effort to tear us down.

Image by GROK AI