Up against a $12.6 billion budget gap and big affordability promises, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pledging to tax the rich. Except he doesn’t control the state budget, and the person who does, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, has just promised the opposite.
Facing her own projected revenue volatility, Hochul announced that she would not raise income taxes to balance her recently proposed $260 billion state budget.
But even she is up against the powers of her office. While Hochul and Mamdani set the budgets for the state and city governments, respectively, it’s the state legislature that ultimately has the power of the purse…