New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued an ultimatum to Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday: approve his income tax increase on the wealthy, or he will raise property taxes by nearly 10%.

The threat arrived alongside his proposed 2027 city budget, a $127 billion spending plan that manages to be more than double the entire state budget of Pennsylvania, Fox News reported.

Pennsylvania has 13 million residents. New York City has 8.4 million. Roughly half the population, more than double the budget. That's the fiscal universe Mamdani wants to expand.

The Shakedown

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, renewed his push to raise taxes on high earners and profitable corporations, framing it as a matter of class solidarity. He put it this way on Tuesday:

"What we are hoping for, what we will spend every day looking towards, is working with Albany to increase taxes on the wealthiest and the most profitable corporations such that a fiscal crisis is not resolved on the backs of working and middle-class New Yorkers."

The problem is structural. Mamdani cannot raise income taxes on his own. That requires approval from the governor at the state level. Hochul has firmly opposed the idea. So the mayor's fallback is the one lever he does control: property taxes. And he's pulling it hard.

This is the oldest move in the progressive playbook. Demand something you know you can't get, then punish the people closest to you when you don't get it. A nearly 10% property tax hike wouldn't land on Manhattan penthouses alone. It would hit every homeowner, every landlord, and every renter whose landlord passes the cost along. The people Mamdani claims to protect are the ones standing directly in the blast radius.

The Numbers Don't Lie, But the Mayor Ignores Them

Wall Street Journal editor-at-large Gerry Baker appeared on Fox News' "America Reports" Wednesday and didn't mince words. He argued that Mamdani's plan reaches far beyond the wealthy:

"The plan he has will hit, not just the rich as they keep claiming, but huge numbers of middle-class taxpayers."

Baker also dismantled the familiar defense that New York's cost of living justifies its outsized government spending. City officials, he noted, will argue that labor costs more, wages run higher, and everything in New York carries a premium. His response was blunt: "There's no justification for that."

A $127 billion city budget for 8.4 million people is not a cost-of-living problem. It's a spending problem. Every dollar of that budget was a political choice, and Mamdani's answer to years of choices that created fiscal pressure is to squeeze taxpayers harder rather than question a single line item.

The Exodus No One in City Hall Wants to Discuss

Baker warned that the tax strategy carries a predictable consequence, one that New York has already been living through:

"The idea that that's going to be good for the city, that it's going be good to tax people even more than they are already, is madness. It means more people will leave the city than already have. There's been a steady outflow over many years."

This is the part progressives refuse to model into their revenue projections. Tax the wealthy, and some percentage of them relocate. Tax property owners, and some percentage of them sell. Every departure shrinks the base that funds the services the city insists it cannot cut. The math turns on itself. Higher rates on fewer payers produce less revenue and more pressure to raise rates again.

It's a feedback loop that has played out in every high-tax jurisdiction that tried to spend its way to equity. The people with options exercise them. The people without options absorb the cost.

Hochul vs. Mamdani: A Contest of Competing Failures

Governor Hochul's opposition to the income tax hike might look like fiscal restraint from a distance. It isn't. Baker characterized the dynamic with precision:

"We're gonna see on whether Kathy Hochul, who wants her own kind of form of sort of limited socialism… whether her limited form is able to trump Zohran Mamdani's extremism."

This is not a battle between fiscal discipline and fiscal recklessness. It's a negotiation over the speed of the same trajectory. Hochul presides over a state government that has spent years expanding programs, adding mandates, and treating taxpayers as an inexhaustible resource. Her objection to Mamdani isn't philosophical. It's jurisdictional. She doesn't want a city mayor setting the tax agenda that she believes belongs to Albany.

New Yorkers watching this clash shouldn't mistake it for a debate about whether government should grow. Both sides have already settled that question. The argument is over who gets to grow it and how fast.

Socialism in Practice

Baker summed up the broader lesson plainly:

"This is socialism in action, this is the Democratic Party in action and the rest of the country's watching."

He's right that the country is watching. New York City has become something close to a controlled experiment in progressive governance at scale. The city spends more per capita than most state governments spend on their entire populations. Its leaders respond to every fiscal shortfall by demanding more from the people who already pay the most. And when those people leave, the leaders blame greed rather than their own policies.

Mamdani's budget proposal and his property tax threat lay bare a governing philosophy that has no limiting principle. There is no revenue number that satisfies it, no spending level that completes it, and no tax rate that represents the ceiling. The only constraint is how much pain voters will tolerate before they either vote differently or leave.

New York is testing that threshold in real time. The rest of the country should take notes.