Zohran Mamdani closed his budget speech in May with a boast. New Yorkers, he told the press, have been told that government “can either be fiscally responsible or invest in people, but never both. This budget proves otherwise.”

The budget proves nothing of the sort. A Democratic governor paid his bills. Deferred pension payments covered most of the rest. Crime sits at record lows because of a police strategy he campaigned to abolish. Hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin is moving jobs to Miami. Apollo, one of the country’s biggest private-equity firms, is shopping for a second headquarters outside New York. And Ron DeSantis just branded Mamdani “Realtor of the Year” for the business he keeps sending Florida.

This matters far beyond New York. Mamdani is the national left’s proof that socialism can govern in America. Six months in, the city runs only where socialism lost.

He promised to defund the police, tax the rich, and socialize the groceries

In June 2020 Mamdani tweeted that the NYPD is “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and called for defunding it. That December he wrote: “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt. Defund it. Dismantle it.” Running for mayor, he demanded $9 billion in new taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. As mayor, he announced five government-run grocery stores, because “a public option allows us to intervene where the market has failed.”

He did apologize to police officers during the campaign. The apology covered “the language that I used.” The language, not the agenda. In January, as mayor, he said of the NYPD’s protest unit: “We need to disband the SRG.”

Attack the police. Take more private wealth. Put the government in the food business. It is the oldest program in the world, and it has a record.

The cops he called wicked are cutting the crime

New York recorded the fewest murders of any first quarter in its history. Through May, CBS News reported, murders are down more than 20 percent and shootings sit at record lows.

Mamdani claimed the win: “our approach to public safety is working.”

Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner he kept from his predecessor, Eric Adams, credits “our precision policing strategy to go after guns, take down violent gangs, and put officers on foot posts where they are needed most.” That strategy runs on the gang database Mamdani campaigned to abolish as a “vast dragnet.” Tisch says the database helped take down roughly 70 gangs last year. The NYPD arrested 36 alleged gang members in Brooklyn in April. Tisch made the point herself: “every single one of them was entered into that database.”

The strategy also runs on more police, not fewer. Tisch told the City Council this month the department will hire more than 550 officers this year and reach 35,555 by December. That is a bigger force than the city ever fielded under his predecessor. It is bigger than the allotment in Mamdani’s own budget.

His replacement for the police never showed up. The $1.1 billion Department of Community Safety he campaigned on, a corps of mental-health workers meant to answer 911 calls instead of cops, launched as a three-person office funded at $260 million. Tisch testified that about 2 percent of the NYPD’s call volume would even qualify for diversion. The City Council asked this month whether any programs had shifted from the NYPD to the new office. She answered: “No.” The talks, she added, “have not yet commenced.”

The mayor promised to replace policing with social work. Policing carried him instead, and he took the bow. The danger has not passed. He still wants the protest unit disbanded; City Hall reaffirmed the pledge days after an ISIS-inspired bombing attempt near the mayor’s own residence. He still claims final authority over Tisch. His old allies attack him from the other side: the Legal Aid Society, the city’s biggest public-defender group, calls the new hiring “yet another broken promise” on police reform. America’s largest city now fields its largest police force in years under a mayor on record calling the institution wicked. How he uses it is the open question hanging over eight million people.

Socialism still cannot pay its own bills

In January, Mamdani announced he had found a $12 billion “budget crisis.” By February, his own numbers cut the hole to $5.4 billion. He threatened a 9.5 percent property-tax increase unless the state stepped in. It did. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat facing reelection, delivered nearly $8 billion in new state help over two years. The Citizens Budget Commission, the city’s oldest budget watchdog, flagged the catch: “The $8 billion isn’t 8 billion in cash. Some of it is authorization.”

The biggest single item closing the gap is not a tax and not a saving. The state gave the city permission to put off pension payments due by 2032 until 2037. That counts as $1.64 billion in savings next year, against $27 billion in pension debt, Reason Foundation found, in the most indebted city in America. The watchdog’s president, Andrew Rein, put it plainly: “We’re basically asking people in the mid-2030s to solve the 2027 budget gap, and that’s simply not fair.”

The “tax the rich” trophy is thinner still. Mamdani demanded $9 billion. He got a tax on second homes that his own press office values at $500 million. His own comptroller scores it at $340 to $380 million. That comptroller, Democrat Mark Levine, counted $2.8 billion in one-time measures and sees budget gaps growing from $7.1 billion to $9.8 billion in the years ahead. Three of the four credit-rating agencies cut the city’s outlook to negative during the budget fight. Moody’s flagged “large and persistent imbalances under still-favorable economic and revenue conditions.”

The last time New York ran on ideology and other people’s money, it ended in 1975 with the famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” and a $2.3 billion federal rescue. The rich did not fund this budget; the state treasury and the city’s own pension funds did. Socialism always runs on someone else’s money. The only thing that changes is whose.

The money is moving to Florida

On Tax Day, Mamdani posted a video announcing the second-home tax from the sidewalk outside Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse. Griffin founded Citadel, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. Within a week, Citadel’s chief operating officer warned employees that the firm’s $6 billion Manhattan office-tower project was now in question. The project carries 6,000 construction jobs and more than 15,000 permanent ones. In May, Griffin told a finance conference the video had gone “from creepy to actually not really creepy, this has gone frightening.” A CEO, he noted, “was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York.” Then he announced the one decision his firm had made with no regrets: expanding its Miami headquarters. Citadel, he said, will add “far more jobs in Miami over the next decade as an immediate and direct consequence of the mayor’s poor decision.”

Apollo has decided to open a second headquarters in Florida or Texas. It could eventually hold 1,000 employees, matching the firm’s entire New York headcount. The location is pending. Steve Roth runs one of the city’s biggest commercial landlords. He called Mamdani “irresponsible and dangerous.” The Partnership for New York City, the city’s main business group, estimates his approach puts 2,700 financial jobs and $168 million a year in tax revenue at risk. Four months into the term, the group noted, he had not hired an economic-development chief.

The top 1 percent of filers pay 48 percent of the city’s income tax, the comptroller’s office has documented. Asked twice whether he had any regrets about the Griffin video, Mamdani would not say the word.

Americans have watched this movie. Gavin Newsom governed an exodus in California and called it leadership; Mamdani is running the same play from City Hall. In April, the socialist magazine Jacobin declared that “the widely anticipated exodus has failed to materialize.” Griffin, Apollo, and Roth answered within two weeks. The magazine’s star exhibit was Citadel’s office-tower project. Griffin now calls that project “a real topic of debate.”

The left is selling failure as proof

Mamdani says the budget “proves otherwise.” Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone wrote that calling the governor’s $4 billion a bailout “is wrong,” that the money reflects “steady leadership,” and that “this budget is a political victory.” In These Times, another socialist magazine, held up Mamdani’s “baby steps” as proof of the “political viability” of democratic socialism nationwide. Supporters celebrated online: “131 days in he balanced a $12 billion deficit without cutting a single service.” Even The Nation covered the mayor’s “victory lap” and then conceded that “most of the heavy lifting was done by the governor.” It called the pension move “creative accounting.”

The left needs New York. If socialism cannot run the richest city in America with a Democratic governor writing the checks and a holdover commissioner cutting the crime, it cannot run anything, and the movement knows it. So the checks become partnership. The cops become “our approach.” The exodus stays a myth until the permits get filed in Miami. New York is the pilot program; the rollout the movement wants is national. The spin is the load-bearing wall of the whole project, because the math never cooperates. The habit is a century old; I wrote in May about Walter Duranty, the New York Times man who collected a Pulitzer for denying Stalin’s famine.

Government groceries fail everywhere they are tried

The grocery plan is where the program still runs at full speed. Mamdani has allocated $70 million for five city-run stores. One 9,000-square-foot store in Manhattan, opening in 2029, will cost an estimated $30 million to build. American grocers kept about 1.6 cents of every sales dollar in 2023, the trade press reported from industry data. Under his model, taxpayers eat the land, the rent, and the construction so the shelf price can look lower. The cost of food does not fall; it moves from the register to the tax bill.

Other cities ran this experiment. Baldwin, Florida opened a town-owned grocery in 2019, and its mayor promised at the opening: “We’re not trying to make a profit.” The store died in under five years. Erie, Kansas bought its only grocery store. It needed each customer to spend $50 a month to break even, got about $14, and handed the keys back to a private operator. Kansas City spent nearly $18 million on a city-backed store over a decade. Its customers fell from 14,000 to 2,000. It closed in August. Mamdani set the standard for his own experiment himself: “If it is not effective at a pilot level, then it does not deserve to be scaled up.”

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote it down in 1920, three years into the Soviet experiment: “Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation.” Boris Yeltsin, two years before he became Russia’s first elected president, felt it in a Houston grocery store in 1989. The sight of ordinary American shelves, he later wrote, left him “quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.” The twentieth century ran the full trial, at a cost Harvard University Press puts at as many as 100 million lives. Mamdani is running it again in a Manhattan market hall and calling the early wreckage proof. The math has never lost one of these arguments. It is not going to start now.