Neither of the leading Democratic contenders for mayor is grappling with the fiscal realities currently confronting New York City.
The two leading Democrats running for New York City mayor, the 33-year-old starry-eyed socialist legislator and the 67-year-old realpolitik former governor, have something surprising in common: Neither is being honest about the fiscal consequences of his proposals. Candidates often fuzz over budget details when they run, but the leading 2025 mayoral campaigns are offering extraordinarily misleading promises, even by low local standards. We’re talking about multi-hundred-million-dollar disconnects. That’s particularly unfortunate at a time when New York City is likely to see its federal funding dry up, when President Trump is itching to escalate conflict with his hometown and when a recession could do even more damage to the city’s bottom line in the years ahead.
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is an incredibly effective communicator who’s offering loads of free stuff underwritten by funding sources that are likely never to materialize.
In Mamdani’s world, landlords of rent-stabilized buildings are living high on the hog while tenants are all rubbing quarters together — and that’s enough to justify four years of across-the-board rent freezes, regardless of the economic analysis of the Rent Guidelines Board. Mamdani happens to live in one of these 960,000 rent-stabilized units, like the 30% of long-term rent-stabilized tenants who report incomes in excess of $100,000 a year. In a New York Editorial Board interview, I asked him whether he needs a rent freeze; he dodged the question.
Nor does Mamdani seem to care that pro-tenant reforms passed in Albany in 2019 greatly reduced building owners’ ability to raise rents, resulting in a situation where forcing repeated rent freezes is likely to result in widespread building disinvestment. Mamdani cites a 12% overall increase in landlord income as supposed evidence that building owners can absorb back-to-back-to-back-to-back freezes — but that figure masks huge variation by building type and location. Plenty of building owners, especially in lower-income neighborhoods, are struggling to cover rising costs.
His housing production math is just as shaky. His idea is to invest $100 billion in public capital spending and task the government, not the private sector, with building hundreds of thousands of units. To make that happen, he’d have to get the state’s permission to borrow about $70 billion above the city’s current debt limit. That’s highly unlikely to happen, and especially unlikely if the man championing the change doesn’t understand what he’s arguing for. In an interview with the New York Daily News Editorial Board (another board on which I sit), I asked Mamdani what the current borrowing cap is, how it’s determined and how much more he’d need to borrow to meet his goal. He had no clue.
Mamdani’s affordability agenda, the bumper sticker on which he’s running, has three big pillars: the rent freeze I mentioned, free childcare and fast free buses.
The second of these would cost $6 billion or more a year, dependent on Albany approving taxes that probably won’t come to pass. The third of these would cost the Metropolitan Transit Authority $650 million annually, which it doesn’t have; that would also have to come from higher taxes, higher subway fares or both. (Congestion pricing funds are spoken for.)
Mamdani often plays fast and loose with budget facts. He vilifies then-Gov. Cuomo for supposedly “starving” the city’s public schools before he and others in the legislature in 2021 forced the state to increase its foundation aid formula. But before and after that change, New York’s per-pupil state education spending was highest the nation, and by a lot. Today, New York City’s per-pupil spending is nearly $40,000, putting the lie to anyone who says that the schools desperately need more money in order to educate students better. (Indeed, every major Democratic candidate except Whitney Tilson answered “yes” when asked by the Citizens Budget Commission, “Do you think increasing public school per-student spending would increase achievement?”)
That same sleight of hand runs throughout Mamdani’s platform, all built on the fiction that New York City government, despite growing from $77 billion in 2014 to $96 billion in 2019 to $115 billion today, is systematically failing the working class and serving the wealthy. One can argue that current aid isn’t effective enough — but one can’t argue that the city isn’t the most generous municipality in America. To name just one example, 50,000 families here get an average of $20,000 a year in rent help, at an annual cost to New York of $1.1 billion.
What about the other candidate atop the polls? That’s Andrew Cuomo — who, having instituted a local property tax cap and held down the rate of growth in state spending as the governor of New York State (at least compared to his predecessors), once boasted to business leaders that he’d governed like a fiscal conservative.
Unfortunately, he’s running a campaign made up of costly and clumsily cobbled-together promises to unions and other constituencies.
For example, he has reversed himself on the wisdom of Tier 6 pension reforms, the slightly-less-generous retirement benefits for public employees passed in 2012 with his support, which are saving city government hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Did Cuomo’s principles change or is he just bending to win union and retiree support?
The need for comprehensive property tax reform has been widely acknowledged across the political spectrum — because the current system is impossible to understand and horribly unfair to all types of residents. Cuomo, who understands this well, wants to cap property tax increases just for the city’s one-to-three-family homes, a patently political play that will make it harder, not easier, to solve the bigger problem, which calls for some sort of grand bargain. Again, the former governor knows exactly what he’s doing: This is an expensive pander, not an answer.
A new state class-size law, which is forcing the city to hire thousands of new teachers to arbitrarily cap the number of students in each classroom, isn’t just an unfunded mandate. It’s a bad use of limited resources, forcing arbitrary limits that will require the hiring of thousands of additional teachers. Research suggests all this spending will yield limited learning gains and have perverse policy consequences; in implementing a similar mandate, California wound up putting lots of underqualified teachers in classrooms serving underprivileged students.
As governor, Cuomo — who talked a lot about the importance of teacher quality and hardly at all about the need to lower class sizes — almost certainly would’ve argued that the mandate was unwise, unfunded or not, and that there are much better ways to increase student achievement. He probably would’ve pointed out that the law will wind up sending more resources to higher-performing schools, comparatively shortchanging schools that serve lower-income students. Mayoral candidate Cuomo, in near-lockstep with the teachers union, simply complains that the state failed to send new funding with the mandate, supporting the end-goal of hiring many more teachers to satisfy a rigid class-size formula even as public school enrollment has yet to recover from prepandemic and pandemic-era declines.
Not least, Cuomo is promising to hire 5,000 more police officers, paying not only their salaries and health care today, but their pensions tomorrow, despite the fact that crime is falling with the NYPD’s current force strength. It’s cheaper than continuing to rely on costly overtime, he says, but budget experts know the math probably doesn’t add up. Meaning, Cuomo would hire those cops at an annual cost of $550 million in year one and $1 billion six years in, with no guarantee of offsetting savings.
And that’s not all! Cuomo is the only major candidate who said “no” when asked if, early in his term, he’d institute a cost-saving “program to eliminate the gap” (PEG), a standard-practice exercise to save taxpayers money in precarious fiscal times. Even Mamdani committed to doing a PEG. And Cuomo is the only Democratic candidate to promise to lower taxes while he’s at it.
How does all this begin to add up? It doesn’t.
So if these two are willfully bad at budget math, is anyone better? Comptroller Brad Lander may be caricatured as a pandering progressive who’s promised to solve street homelessness for mentally ill people for the hard-to-believe price of $100 million a year (and then $30 million per year thereafter), and there is surely more fiscal slipperiness in his plans, but overall, his detailed taxing and spending proposals make a better-faith effort not to commit hundreds of millions we don’t have. He also has done the sharpest thinking about how the city’s budget can withstand a federal drubbing. Former comptroller Scott Stringer also deserves points for fiscal responsibility, as does hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson.
A cynic may say it’s not a coincidence that the two candidates with the least realistic, most fiscally disingenuous promises are sitting atop the polls. Maybe stretching math to make irresponsible promises is part of what put them there. I wouldn’t be the first person to suggest that telling voters what they want to hear — that tradeoffs aren’t real, that resources aren’t limited — might be a feature, not a bug in an effective politician.
But it doesn’t always have to be this way. Does it?