The Billionaires' Bathos Club

"To listen to some of the nation's wealthiest, you'd think Mamdani was putting them in danger of living like the average American, i.e., someone who struggles to pay higher food and gas prices, who's increasingly at a loss to afford retirement and healthcare, and who must rely on heavy infusions of high-interest credit-card debt to get by. But no. Mamdani simply wants wealthy Gothamites to pay more taxes on pieds-à-terre worth more than $5 million."

"Higher taxes on second homes already exist in conservative strongholds like South Carolina and Montana, but if Mamdani adopts them in New York, the ultrarich argue, we might as well be in Soviet Russia. If they cannot have an unfair advantage in a city that's increasingly unaffordable for middle-class people, they'll take their ball and go home-or at least to Miami."

"And what will the city do without them? They're job creators, they argue. In a recent Financial Times story, one unnamed and aggrieved well-to-do restaurateur from Miami with a second home in Manhattan spells out the horrifying injustice of it all. "I think it's shameful," he said. "I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me, servers in restaurants. If we're not there, there are going to be less people being paid.""

A democratic socialist mayor provokes intense outrage from very wealthy people by advocating higher taxes. The proposed changes target wealthy New Yorkers with pieds-à-terre worth over $5 million, even though higher taxes on second homes already exist elsewhere. Wealthy opponents portray the policy as a slide toward Soviet-style conditions and threaten to leave the city. They also argue that they are job creators and that higher taxes would reduce employment for blue-collar workers such as restaurant servers. The argument frames tax increases as harmful to workers’ pay, while critics view the claims as self-pity and an attempt to preserve unfair advantages in an increasingly unaffordable city.

Read at The Nation