New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated tax day this week by announcing what he called the first pied-à-terre tax in New York’s history, an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than five million dollars whose owners do not live in the city full time, naming hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s two-hundred-and-thirty-eight-million-dollar penthouse as a specific target.
Jack Butler, deputy opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to note that Mamdani’s cheerful announcement tells you everything you need to know about the worldview animating major American blue city governments right now.
Butler said the most revealing thing about the video was not the policy itself but the affect surrounding it. Mamdani was thrilled to announce the tax. He wished New Yorkers a happy tax day. Butler said he is reasonably confident that the overwhelming majority of people who just got through April fifteenth were not feeling thrilled or happy, and that the enthusiasm with which Mamdani greets the opportunity to extract money from property owners reflects a fundamentally different orientation from anyone who has actually thought seriously about what keeps a city economically functional. Proft noted that Griffin’s likely response to the pied-à-terre tax will mirror what happened in Chicago, where Griffin liquidated most of his personal and corporate real estate presence and departed, accepting a roughly forty-million-dollar nominal loss on his Chicago property to get out, a price he apparently considered worth paying.
The more immediately absurd initiative Butler addressed was Mamdani’s announcement of a thirty-million-dollar city-owned grocery store, which the mayor hopes to complete before the end of his first term. Butler said stores go up in New York for far less money in far less time and actually serve the neighborhoods around them. The area where the city-owned store is proposed already has functioning private grocers. The project, in his assessment, is not a serious attempt to solve a food access problem but a vehicle to pay off activist allies and the political infrastructure that got Mamdani elected. He noted that Kansas City ran a comparable experiment with a city-owned grocery store that was shuttered after three years when the city could no longer subsidize its operations, and said he doubts Mamdani’s version will outperform that precedent, let alone Kroger or Whole Foods.
Despite Mamdani’s genuine political charisma and the enthusiasm of the left-wing activist base that swept him into office, Butler noted that his job approval rating is already lower than Eric Adams’s was at the equivalent point in Adams’s tenure, and Adams is a mayor who ended his term as a diminished non-entity without even attempting reelection. Mamdani won with a narrow majority and has a significant portion of New York’s electorate that is not ideologically captured by his base. If results do not follow the announcements, Butler said there is considerable downward room for someone whose political success to date has been built more on energy and symbolism than on demonstrated governance.
On the California Senate race to replace Eric Swalwell following his implosion, Butler said billionaire Tom Steyer has emerged as the apparent frontrunner after Swalwell’s various scandals including the FEC exposure over campaign funds used for childcare expenses and other matters. He described Steyer’s campaign platform, which Steyer promoted openly on social media, as genuinely extraordinary. The plan would empower the state of California to arrest ICE agents operating within the state to enforce federal immigration law, and would use state resources to release individuals detained by those agents. Butler said Steyer at least has the honesty not to hide what he is proposing in euphemism, but that the substance of it is a direct invitation to the kind of state-federal confrontation that has an odious and dangerous history in American politics. He compared it unfavorably to the posture of Minnesota county attorney Mary Moriarty, who issued arrest warrants for two ICE agents on assault charges, saying he finds even that baffling enough without adding a scheme to systematically arrest federal immigration officers.
The conversation closed on the benefits fraud investigations working their way through federal and state systems, with Butler expressing cautious long-term optimism that the exposure of large-scale fraud in blue state government programs could eventually move voters who have been content to return the same Democratic leadership cycle after cycle. He said he believes the country is only at the very beginning of what the full scope of blue state benefits fraud will turn out to look like, and that the more voters come to understand that the fraud may not be an accidental oversight but a structural feature of how these governments direct money to preferred constituencies, the angrier they will get and the more willing they will be to demand something different. He acknowledged that getting to that point of public awareness requires a level of sustained exposure that has not yet occurred, but said the trajectory of the investigations gives him reason for cautious hope in the medium term.