Opinion
By Greg Maresca, 11-7-25
Twenty-four years after 9/11, New York City elected a 34-year-old whose biography reads like a Marxist coming-of-age novel with a Brooklyn rewrite. Zohran Mamdani, Muslim, activist, and self-described democrat-socialist, will become mayor January 1, 2026, in a city where the ideological spectrum stretches from hedge fund libertarians to abolish landlords.
Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, is a professor at Columbia University with a communist lens so thick it requires a prescription. His mother, Mira Nair, is a filmmaker and an anti-Israeli activist in a city that is nearly 15% Jewish, and the politics of Israel are not just foreign policy; they are dinner table discourse, donor strategy, and district electoral math.
COVID-19 did what no mayoral candidate dared: paid people for not working, cleared the streets and made two gallons of gas cheaper than an 8oz. bottled water on the Staten Island Ferry. If it promised to lower taxes, COVID would be mayor.
No sane individual would have imagined New Yorkers electing a communist Islamic mayor. Republicans missed all the red flags — again. But when the hammer and sickle flies over City Hall, it’s past time to take notes.
In a 2020 tweet, Mamdani declared: “Taxation isn’t theft. Capitalism is.” More recently, he reignited debate by stating, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.”
Such a credo isn’t new with the left, but Mamdani’s timing is telling and a political provocation.
Campaigns love a villain, and “tax the rich” and “pay your fair share” polls better than “spending reform” and “balanced budgets.” It is the tax code’s version of “thoughts and prayers”— comforting, vaguely righteous and nebulous.
This is less about math and more about emotion.
It is a revenue play aimed at the city’s top earners.
Mamdani’s proposed two-point hike on million-dollar earners doesn’t just raise the marginal rate from 3.8% to 5.8%. It’s a 51.5% increase that to the left spells: “justice.” Never does anyone discuss spending levels – ever.
When the figures fail to add up, but the slogans do, it’s pure propaganda.
In Democrat-governed cities, everything is free provided you can run fast enough.
The left in New York isn’t just marching; they want to legislate without a syllabus.
Democrat lawmakers, especially in high-cost cities, test top earners’ patience and zip codes believing that more taxes for mass transit, failing public schools and potholed roadways that double as baptismal fonts for their Tesla’s is business as usual.
The left fails to comprehend how the wealthy drive innovation, philanthropy and job creation. Entrepreneurs earn their keep by producing what people want while making life better. Attacking the wealthy hurts everyone. Like everyone else, they have every right to keep what they have earned or inherited.
In the theater of taxation, “taxing the rich” is the opening number, while the encore is a moving van heading south. In millionaire calculus it equals a call to your CPA, and in real estate terms it’s a boon for brokers and Florida condo developers.
Contrary to the arguments of many who want to raise taxes, economists have proven that the tax code is quite progressive. Regarding federal taxes in 2024, the top one percent paid 45.8% of all taxes, while the bottom 50% paid just 2.3%.
The politics of “tax the rich” only stokes avarice, jealousy, and class envy.
This dogma is a wrecking ball aimed at the city’s economic engine, stripping New Yorkers of the entrepreneurial grit that built the Big Apple.
Private business fuels prosperity by creating and sustaining jobs, but its lifeblood has always been the entrepreneurs. These bold innovators built America, from the Mayflower to modern tech giants, by daring to invest, create, and push boundaries. Unlike risk-averse government bureaucracies, they embrace risk driving progress. Our freedom and economic strength exist because of them and if we forget that, we jeopardize the very engine of growth.
History will remind us harshly that envy will dismantle the very foundation of American prosperity.
Often misattributed to Lincoln, a minister warned more than 150 years ago: You can’t help the poor by destroying the rich, lift workers by crushing employers, stay solvent by overspending, or unite people by fueling class hatred.
His words still resonate.
Mr. Maresca is a New York City native and a Marine Corps veteran residing in Flyover, America.
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
