The math continues to get worse in Mandami's world

New York City’s Credit Outlook Downgraded to Negative by Moody’s Amid Mamdani’s Budget Deficit

There’s an old saying in finance: the market doesn’t care about your feelings. It doesn’t care about your campaign promises, your ideology, or who you blame for the mess you inherited. It only cares about the math.

And in New York City, the math has gotten ugly fast.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office with grand ambitions and an even grander budget — $127 billion, up from $115 billion under his predecessor. That’s a $12 billion leap in a single transition, because apparently $115 billion just wasn’t enough.

To cover the gap, he’s proposed a 9.5% property tax hike and raiding nearly $1 billion from the city’s rainy day fund. On top of inherited costs, including $4.3 billion in migrant-related expenses, Mamdani has layered new spending: a childcare expansion projected to balloon from $73 million to $425 million by 2027 and a free bus initiative that could cost $800 million.

Then came the reckoning nobody in City Hall seems to want to acknowledge. On Wednesday, Moody’s Ratings revised New York City’s credit outlook from stable to negative — the first step toward a potential downgrade of the city’s Aa2 bond rating.

Spend more, tax more, borrow more, blame your predecessor, then beg a higher authority for a bailout. How many times do we have to watch this cycle play out before we call it what it is?

Critics of socialism have warned about this pattern for decades. New York City is now living proof.

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