Taxing the Rich
Plus: New York City's persistent budget problems, the crony capitalist scramble for Venezuelan oil, senseless trafficking PSAs, and more...
Budget blues. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin have agreed to push back the May 1 deadline by which the mayor must issue an executive budget proposal, while the two figure out how to cover the city's $5.4 billion budget gap, reports Politico.
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Additionally, they are going to jointly call for more state budget aid and "change" to the state's pass-through entity tax (PTET) that will allegedly generate an additional $1 billion in revenue, reports The City's Katie Honan.
The announcement tomorrow with @nycmayor and @SpeakerMenin will be for more state aid through AIM, a change to PTET tax that should generate $1B, and a budget extender to go beyond May 1 Due to late state budget, per sources
— katie honan (@katie_honan) April 28, 2026
The details are a little complex, but the PTET is essentially a voluntary state tax that certain types of businesses can pay (which is then offset by state income tax credits given to the individual business owners) in order to reduce the business owners' federal tax liability.
According to a recent Manhattan Institute brief by E.J McMahon, almost everyone who benefits from the PTET is a millionaire income earner, which would explain why it would be a target for Mamdani.
The mayor campaigned on raising taxes on high-income earners and large corporations to pay for a raft of new spending. The city's fiscal situation has seen him push for those same taxes just to cover the city's existing spending.
Unfortunately for Mamdani (and fortunately for everyone else), New York City can't raise income or corporate taxes by itself. The state needs to sign off on those tax increases.
And Gov. Kathy Hochul has thus far opposed permitting the city to hike business and income taxes. She has however proposed a tax on second homes worth over $5 million, which would allegedly pull in $500 million each year.*
The proposal to change the PTET in order to raise more revenue appears to be another to "tax the rich" without more general income tax hikes.
More money, more problems. The thing to keep in mind as the budget battles in New York City play out is that this problem is not going away, regardless of what tax increases Mamdani is able to squeeze through this year.
The city has a persistent, growing budget gap driven by the continually rising cost of existing programs. The Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group, estimates that the city's budget gap could reach $10 billion within the next couple of years.
Fixing today's shortfall sets up a similar scramble for more revenue next year and the year after. And there are diminishing returns to bilking big business and the very rich. On the margins, they will start to leave the city. New York City's millionaires account for less than 1 percent of tax filers and pay 37 percent of the city's income taxes.
Mamdani needs to decide if he's willing to ask New Yorkers generally to pay for the government they have (let alone the even larger one he campaigned on creating) with broad-based tax increases, or else figure out what city spending his socialist revolution can live without.
Cashing in. Lobbying firm Ballard Partners is using its close relationship to the Trump administration to recruit clients looking for oil contracts in post-Maduro Venezuela, according to a new investigation from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
Here's one example from the report:
Ten days after Maduro's capture, on January 13, Ballard Partners announced a new dedicated Venezuela Working Group and touted "former high-ranking government Trump administration officials" working at the firm.
That same day, Ballard registered Swedish-based investment company Maha Capital as a new client seeking assistance with "approvals for Venezuelan oil field acquisitions and operations." Micah Ketchel and Thomas Boodry, former Trump aides who've also worked for Rubio, were listed as part of the lobbying team. Maha Capital paid Ballard $120,000 in the first quarter of 2026 to lobby both the State and Treasury departments.
On March 18, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) authorized "established" U.S. entities to do business with Venezuela's state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), paving the way for Maha Capital to move forward inside Venezuela. In a press release that same day, Maha Capital's CEO said he was "pleased" with the decision, and the company announced it would buy a stake in a Venezuelan oil field and would transfer that stake to its U.S.-based subsidiaries to comply with the OFAC decision.
President Donald Trump has been pretty blunt in saying that his priority following the capture of Nicolás Maduro has been getting Venezuelan oil flowing again. The kind of influence operation described in the POGO report isn't necessarily surprising in that context. It does puncture the idea that our removal of Madruo had all that much to do with furthering American security or Venezuelan freedom.
Scenes from Washington, D.C.: Airports are generally comfortable and clean places, even if they are awash in unrelenting statism. It's hard to think of another environment where the average citizen is more surveilled, controlled, and propagandized.
The particular signature of Big Brother that caught my eye traveling through Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport yesterday was this poster in the men's room instructing me to be on the lookout for telltale signs of human trafficking.
These are some odd human trafficking signs to tell the general public to look out for. I'm not sure how anyone would be able to tell by mere observation whether their fellow travelers have a genuine relationship with the child in their care or if they have reasonable travel plans.
Perhaps the intended audience is security personnel or airline employees who would be able to glean more information about travelers while doing their job. If that's the case, though, why post these announcements in public restrooms?
The best thing one can say about the above PSA is that it's dumb. At worst, it encourages travelers to be on the lookout for human trafficking activity that is both exceptionally rare and not apparent to the average observer.
Every once in a while, one sees news stories about an airline passenger who's been falsely accused of trafficking someone who turns out to be their own child or other relative. It's a terrible thing for the falsely accused to go through. Posters like the above only encourage more erroneous trafficking accusations.
QUICK HITS
- Analysts predict spiking energy prices.
- The Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of "geofence warrants."
- Is OpenAI spending too much on data centers?
- Speaking of, Hakeem Jeffries beats up on data centers.
- The alleged correspondents' dinner shooter has been charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump.
*CORRECTION: This article originally misstated the estimated revenue from Hochul's second-home tax proposal.
