New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced plans to tax the city’s wealthiest residents in an effort to fill the budget deficit of more than $12 billion.
During an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Mamdani told host Andrew Ross Sorkin that city officials “need to change our relationship to the wealthiest residents and most profitable corporations here in New York City” in order to address the deficit. He added that the deficit “requires the kinds of increased revenue on the top one percent of New Yorkers who make a million dollars a year or more, increasing their taxes by two percent.”
“It also means that we look at the relationship between the city and the state, where New York City is the economic engine of the state of the country, and yet while we contribute 54.5 percent of the state’s revenue, we only receive 40.5 percent in return,” Mamdani explained.
The mayor noted that the city has to “both increase taxes on the wealthiest” and needs “to also change the relationship with the state, and we have to pursue these kinds of savings and efficiencies here in our city.”
Upon being sworn in as the New York City Mayor, Mamdani vowed to implement his socialist agenda. “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it,” he said, adding, “Because no matter what you eat, how you pray or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share, New Yorkers.”
