The recent news that New York City is facing a $12 billion budget gap is a dose of reality to the fledgling Mamdani administration, which seems to think money grows on trees.
But it’s no surprise to those of us who have raised alarms about the “drunken sailor” type spending that is so common in this city and state. Sadly, it turns out that common sense is not so common in a city run by socialists who believe the answer to every problem is to spend more money, even if the problem was created by their own misguided policies.
As a result of this perpetual break then spend-to-fix-ideology, the city’s budget has ballooned from $77 billion to its current $112.4 billion since 2014. Our city government continues to create more unnecessary programs while neglecting the basic city services that New Yorkers expect when they pay taxes like public safety and garbage pickup — which was more evident than ever now. The fact is Mayor Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism” stinks just as bad as the garbage piling up on our streets.
New York City with a population of 8.4 million, a land area of 304 square miles and 6,300 miles of streets and highways has a budget that’s only $5 billion less than the state of Florida’s with its population of 23.3 million, land area of 53,625 square miles, and state road network of more than 122,000 miles. It’s clear that something is drastically wrong in the way our city has been run under one party Democratic rule. No wonder so many former New York taxpayers now call income tax-free Florida home.
It’s time to stop wild giveaways and focus on the fiduciary responsibility that New York taxpayers are owed.
That fiduciary responsibility was cast aside on a massive scale by the de Blasio administration with failed programs like his wife’s ThriveNYC mental health initiative and the Renewal school program that together swallowed-up close to $1.8 billion in tax dollars. Not to mention, $7 billion in “emergency” contracts during the pandemic that included $224 million in medical equipment later sold for a measly $500,000.
The Adams administration was no better, throwing away $432 million in emergency contracts to DocGo, and more than $7 billion to house illegal immigrants, including gang members, in luxury hotels for $370 per room per day.
What’s worse is the amount of crime that we bought for this money. A Freedom of Information Law request that I made last year showed that there were approximately 4,000 criminal migrants in these shelters that were arrested for 16,000 crimes!
Only in a poorly run city like ours would citizens be forced to foot the bill to house, feed, and provide medical care (among other giveaways), to those creating mayhem and wreaking havoc. Thankfully, President Trump’s securing of the southern border and his enforcement of our immigration laws has led to the emptying of these shelters and crime plummeting across nearly every category.
However, whether it’s the cronyism at the NYC Department of Education which spends more per pupil than any other municipality in the nation or the unchecked costs of the nonprofits that run the homeless-industrial complex where a month’s stay is more than a middle-class family’s mortgage — taxpayers come last.
With a $12 billion hole, there is no room for the mayor’s pie-in-the-sky socialist programs. The abandonment of the Marxism and misguided policies he touted during his campaign and the realization that New York will only flourish with safe streets, less regulation, and respect for taxpayers might sound like wishful thinking, but it’s the only way our city can survive four years of Mamdani.
Malliotakis represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn in Congress and serves on the House Ways and Means Committee and the Joint Economic Committee.
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