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this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Mamdani making T. Swizzle pay NYC taxes was the reason he balanced the budget? I thought it's because he negotiated with NY state for aid (which, fair game; NYC pays more in taxes than it gets back), delayed the city pension, and is finalizing a pied-à-terre tax.
What meaningful raise on Taylor Swift's taxes has Zohran Mamdani imposed? Did she not pay taxes before? What's the source here?
The real world is allowed to be complicated and messy, and ironically, reducing it to "hurr durr he taxed Taylor Swift" is doing a disservice to what Mamdani actually managed to work out to balance the budget – which is imperfect, but he inherited a $12 billion deficit from a grifter. It's good for what it is.
Taylor Swift owns multiple secondary properties in New York City.
She has amassed a massive real estate footprint on a single block in Tribeca, worth an estimated $50+ million. Her holdings include:
Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani finalized a deal to implement a pied-à-terre tax surcharge on luxury secondary residences in NYC.
The tax starts as a 4% surcharge on the property's value and then there is an annual charge that scales up progressively based on the assessed value.
Rhode Island passed a similar luxury second-home tax targeting non-resident estates over $1 million, a piece of legislation that the press nicknamed the "Taylor Swift Tax" due to its impact on her $17 million Watch Hill mansion.
To say that this alone is balancing the budget is an oversimplification (what are hot takes if not reductive) but the tax will have a meaningful impact because she owns a lot of property in NYC.
The tax in its entirety is supposed to bring around 500 million. The NYC budget was 12 billion in the red.
It's a great start, but suggesting that they managed to balance out the budget thanks to something that handled 1/24th of that deficit is just silly.
Enough partial solutions will sum up to a whole. If we treat them all as insignificant, then none will be enacted and no progress will be made.
Did I say anything remotely like that?
Or, maybe, did I say "it's a great start, but let's not overreact"?
Sure, it is reductive but I also get what the image is referring to and don't think we have to be too literal about it. It's saying the spirit of that tax (ie. taxing the ultra wealthy) is how Mamdani is going about balancing the budget - while invoking a very recognizable billionaire to drive the point home. I read it more as using Taylor Swift as an example rather than insinuating her taxes, or the secondary estate tax in general, would be enough to balance the budget on their own.
Many hot takes are like this. They're meant to capture your attention, and while they may not be literally true on their own, the good ones have a reasonable conceptual foundation.
I think that it creates a false image in people's eyes.
For context: I'm all for taxing the rich. At the very least the should have all their methods of "avoiding" tax removed, but I honestly hope they get taxed something like 90% for their insane wealth.
At the same time I know a bit about how the world works and I have friends who work in AML, so I know that "taxing the rich" will never bring as much money as people think it would.
Back when Musk pretended to be the "cool leftist millionaire" he would sometimes boast about the taxes he paid, trying to be "the shining example" for other top 1%. He was still paying a tax rate of between 0.4% and 0.1% - thanks to his accountants being creative.
On top of that, people completely do not understand what progressive taxes mean. They think that if you have a tax level of 10% for $0-1000 and 20% for $1001-10000, then it means that if you're earning $2000, you would pay $400 in taxes. Which is not true, you would pay (100010%)+(100020%) = $300.
But this fundamental misunderstanding makes them think that a billionaire should be paying some massive amounts of money from ALL their total net worth (which is also confusing "wealth" with "worth", btw). Even if we somehow someday got a fair and honourable billionaire, their tax payments would feel like they're avoiding taxes because of those misconceptions.
This meme reinforces a false reality where these taxes are significant enough to change things - they're not and they most probably won't be.
It’s not how he’s doing it though. The biggest items in his balancing act are the billions of dollars in state aid and regulatory exemptions he’s called in, the deferral of pensions contributions for 5 years, punting key policies down the road to 202X and an accounting quirk that saw NYC over-estimate the number of employees it would have this FY to the tune of $1.3bn in non-existent salaries. So he did bring $500m in extra taxes, and he negotiated state aid, but mostly it seems to be abot not doing things, and taking the credit for coincidences.
Careful. Hurr-durr is your voter base!
Yeah this seriously needs a source