‘They Never Say Thank You’: Mamdani and California Want to Take More and More From Rich

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: Two things that came together for me. One was [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s 9.5% increase in the property tax for New Yorkers, but not that alone. I’m sure our audience has read about that. But I was looking at Power Line. I always like to give a shout out to them because they have some great articles, and they were comparing New York State’s budget versus Florida’s budget.

And they came up with, well, it’s only half at the state level. So I thought, well, let’s look at the city level, New York City versus Miami. And while the billions that each of them has to spend is not meaningful in and of themselves. So, for example, New York City’s budget is $127 billion while Miami’s is only $3.4.

But that being said, per citizen, what has to be paid into these cities. And so, for Mamdani, each of his citizens has to pay $14,431 in for his budget. And in Miami it’s just half of that, at just under $7,000 per citizen.

Victor Davis Hanson: And it’s more disproportionate because in New York, the number of people who are actually paying taxes is a much smaller percentage than in Miami.

He inherited the city that was this blue chip financial market, this cultural, financial capital of the world, and the first thing he did was raise spending by $11 billion.

Second thing he did was prove that he couldn’t get the trash or the snow off the street during the storm.

Third thing he did, it was very hard to find an appointee who somewhere in their dark history had not issued or written something antisemitic.

All he does is smile and try to be … basically, his message is: I’m not Lenin, and Trotsky or Stalin. I’m the nice, happy faced communist, and you’re going to like me, and you’re going to like my communism. We’re all going to get along.

I mean, if you’re in New York, if you’re in California, you got a choice.

If you’re in California and this billionaire tax passes, and you’ve got to come up with $50 million, you’re going flee. If you’re in New York, and they’re going to raise your property tax on these multi multimillion dollar buildings, you’re talking what could be $20 or 30, 40, 50 million more a year, then you’re going to flee, get out.

If you don’t, they’re just going to keep doing it. They’re going keep targeting you because they have an idea. I don’t think people realize that.

The socialist mind … I knew a lot of socialists in the universities and some friends of mine, and they always think … The whole core of socialism is I work hard, and no one knows how I suffer at my job as a nurse, as a farmer, whatever. And I believe in the labor theory of value.

Why is it that when Victor had a PhD but he was pruning vines, he was only making $4 an hour—I was for three years—and then all of a sudden, five years later, he is an academic, and he is sitting in between classes and having coffee and he’s making $50 an hour. That’s not fair.

And so, they don’t think about supply and demand, expertise, education, nothing. And somebody would say, “Well, when Victor was pruning vines, a lot of people could not only prune them, they could probably prune them better.”

When he was teaching a particular Greek literature class, and they thought that was an important class to offer. Questionable, but that’s what they said. Very few people could do it. They don’t accept that.

And so they run on this envy that we work hard, and we get up, and we do things, and therefore we should be compensated. And that’s what a socialist is, and they’re going keep raising taxes.

The other thing about it is when they raise taxes, they don’t ever say, thank you. Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, even Diane [Feinstein], they’re all wealthy, but they never said, “We want to thank the people in California that are the 1% that are paying 50% of the income tax.”

And by the way, the 50% of the income tax in California, there’s only about, I don’t know what there is, 250 billionaires? They usually pay capital gains tax. They pay at about, I don’t know, 28%. The people in that 1% of Californians are highly compensated professionals and small business people who make a million or two million, three million dollars, and then they get hit with a 13.3% tax rate, plus their federal plus Medicare.

So they’re paying 55% of their income and nobody ever says, “Thank you for doing that, you people, we have a very skilled elite that allows us to have this huge budget.” They don’t. The attitude is always, “They have to. They have to pay more.”

I remember in 1991 there was a fiscal crisis in California and the state was broke.

Well, it’s always broke. It always has a deficit, but this was a really bad deficit. So, they decided to go after all state agencies, and one of them was the California State University system. In the past you always could lay off part-time lecturers. But then they got the idea, “We exploit those people so well. We pay them so little that by laying them off—we really reduce about 40% of our classes, which are big money earners. And they don’t cost us anything. We exploit them. No benefit. But the ones that really are the high-priced assets, if you’re going to go after budget cuts, are the tenured full professor, top step in fields that we feel are not essential.

I disagreed with that. So they started laying off Russian professors, classics professors—I was on leave that year—dance professors, which was bad. It was really bad. But when you listen to them, and I knew them very well, they’d say, “Well, these people can pay. Why aren’t we taxing more? Why don’t we raise taxes?”

I said, “We already have the highest income tax.” Well, they have a lot of money, or they wouldn’t be able to pay what they do. But they never made the connection that their job was dependent on somebody being willing. So they had just contempt for the people that were already paying their salaries.

And some of these classes had three and four people in them. But it was just outrage. It was never, “Why don’t we cut our expenses and save the taxpayer?” It was always, “Ah, they owe us. They owe us. And that’s the attitude of the Left.”

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