Now Zohran Mamdani Wants to Raise Property Taxes, Too

“There will be losers,” mayoral candidate warns

Also in today’s newsletter: the New York Times’ strange description of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. And Robert Kraft helps break ground for a new Chabad building in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

Zohran Mamdani speaking at a May 11, 2021, rally to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel.

The Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, socialist Zohran Mamdani, is already running for mayor on a promise to raise taxes by $10 billion a year, mainly by increasing the corporate tax rate and the personal income tax rate.

Now Mamdani is adding yet another tax increase pledge—this one on property taxes.

“The time has come for a change to our property tax system.” Mamdani said, complaining that the current system “is inequitable.”

“This will be a part of our Albany agenda and it will be a primary part,” Mamdani said, promising that after his changes, “there will be winners, there will be losers. There’s no question about it.”

Mamdani made his comments in an interview with my former New York Sun colleague Errol Louis on NY1. Louis deserves credit for eliciting the news. Alas he didn’t follow up by asking Mamdani who would be the winners and who would be the losers under the changed property tax plan.

Instead of headlining the newsworthy property tax comments, the cable outlet headlined the interview “How Mamdani plans to make NYC more affordable.” That cheerleading headline is almost worthy of a campaign advertisement, and it misrepresents the situation for those who Mamdani himself concedes would be “losers.” New York will not be “more affordable” for those whose income, corporate, and property taxes all increase under a Mayor Mamdani. It would be less affordable.

Property tax increases could be an alternative route for Mamdani to raise revenues for his planned spending binge if Governor Hochul or Governor Stefanik or their legislative allies block his attempts to raise corporate and income taxes.

The NY1-provided summary of the interview is also anodyne: “Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani spoke with NY1 political anchor Errol Louis Monday on a number of key issues facing the city.” The way NY1 makes its money is mainly through New York City politicians requiring the city’s cable television providers to carry it (and then pay carriage fees), not by serving up clickable headlines to readers, so I guess I can understand what is going on here. It offers an opportunity for The Editors to take the NY1 interview and place a headline over it that calls attention to the news instead of obscuring it.

Rather than focusing on affordability, Mamdani spent part of last week demonizing Israelis as child-killers. Mamdani greeted Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to the United Nations by saying, “during the course of his speech, another Palestinian child will undoubtedly be killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, as they have been every single hour for nearly two years.”

Netanyahu offered a forceful rebuttal of those claims in his UN speech, saying, “Hamas implants itself in mosques, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and tries to force these civilians not to leave, to stay in harm’s way. It often threatens them at gunpoint if they try to do so. For Israel, every civilian casualty is a tragedy; for Hamas, it’s a strategy. Hamas uses civilians as human shields and as props in its sick propaganda war against Israel….Those who peddle the blood libels of genocide and starvation against Israel are no better than those who peddled blood libels against the Jews in the Middle Ages, when they falsely accused us of poisoning wells, spreading plague and using the blood of children to bake Passover Matzas. Antisemitism dies hard. In fact, it doesn’t die at all. It just keeps coming back with its libelous lies, refurbished, regurgitated, over and over again.”

Mamdani also blundered in his New Year’s greeting to “our Jewish friends and neighbors.”

“The Jewish calendar turns to the year 5786. That number alone speaks to the endurance of this faith over millenia,” Mamdani said. But in Jewish tradition the year 5786 is a count of the years since the creation of the world, not the age of the Jewish faith. It’s not like Christianity, which marks years from the birth of Jesus. In a message presumably intended to reassure Jewish voters disgusted by his extreme anti-Israel activism (a boycott of Israel, an arrest of Netanyahu, false charges of genocide) and his socialism, Mamdani winds up just betraying his ignorance—or his lack of Jewishly literate inner-circle campaign advisers.

With Mayor Adams announcing today that he is out of the race, it falls to Republican Curtis Sliwa and to the former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who is running as an independent, to try to hold Mamdani accountable on the tax and Israel-related issues.

New York Times on Laura Ingraham: The New York Times reports, “The biggest female star on Fox News is, perhaps, the blond, nationalist shock jock Laura Ingraham.” Is Laura Ingraham’s hair color really the first thing readers need to know about her? And what does “nationalist” even mean in this context, anyway? Are the Times reporters such globalists that they think anyone who still believes in countries with borders rather than a U.N.-ruled world with everyone speaking Esperanto deserves to be labeled a “nationalist”? Laura Ingraham clerked for Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. All the New York Times can see is that she has blond hair.

The Times manages to write about Fox News’ Trey Gowdy and Dana Perino and Shannon Bream in a different story today without mentioning their hair, so maybe someone just has it in for Ingraham. Ingraham was very successful also on the radio, a medium where hair color is not particularly important.

Meanwhile, while I was searching the archives for references to Ingraham, I came across this from 2010: “Congress Investigates Beck, Ingraham Advertisers.” “While the Democrats still have a majority in Congress, they are doing what they can to use their government power against their critics in the press. A release today from Rep. Anthony Weiner begins, ‘Rep. Anthony Weiner (D – Queens & Brooklyn) and House Commerce Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Rush (D – Chicago) formally announced a hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection to investigate the business practices of Goldline International, a precious metals dealer that uses aggressive sales tactics and conservative spokespeople such as Fox News’ Glenn Beck to sell overpriced gold coins.’ The release goes on, ‘Goldline Plays off Public Fears of Government Takeover and Has Formed an Unholy Alliance with Conservative Pundits to Drive a False Narrative...Goldline employs several conservative pundits to act as shills for its’ precious metal business, including Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Laura Ingraham, and Fred Thompson.’” For all the left-wingers worked up about Brendan Carr and Jimmy Kimmel, where was the outrage back in 2010 when Congressional Democrats were investigating Fox News advertisers?

A groundbreaking for Chestnut Hill Chabad: Amid all the talk of the effects of the war in the Middle East on American Jewry and of the antisemitism on college campuses and elsewhere, one underappreciated phenomenon has been the rapid growth of Lubavitch chasidism, the Orthodox Jewish movement known as Chabad (an acronym for the Hebrew words chochmah, or wisdom, binah or understanding, and da’at, or knowledge). This movement, inspired by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), is focused on outreach and has thrived worldwide, including on college campuses.

From left: Robert Kraft, Rabbi Mendy Uminer, and Grunie Uminer at a groundbreaking event for Chabad at Chestnut Hill.

This morning I stopped by a groundbreaking for a new $22 million, 20,000-square-foot building for Chabad at Chestnut Hill, a neighborhood that straddles Newton and Brookline, adjacent to Boston. Speakers at the event—including Rabbi Mendy Uminer and his wife Grunie, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft—stressed how the warmth, pride, and joy of this community counter the evil, anger, and hate. Rabbi Uminer noted that when he and Grunie arrived 25 years ago they had one child; now they have ten. The community has grown along with the family.

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