New York’s Next Mayor Faces a Fiscal Crisis

Zohran Mamdani’s decisive primary win has the press speculating whether Albany will approve major tax hikes to fund his socialist agenda if he wins the mayor’s office in November. But as Manhattan Institute fellow and former New York City planner Eric Kober argues, the city council’s irresponsible budget package may present the next mayor with a major fiscal crisis—and foreclose any chance of creating ambitious new programs.

While New York City’s budget is balanced on paper, an economic downturn could result in unexpectedly low revenues. And as Kober notes, the city’s fiscal outlook has soured, with slowing employment gains and federal funding cuts.

“The next mayor may have to spend his time managing a crisis,” he writes, “not inaugurating a socialist paradise or whatever limited vision for the city Mamdani’s rivals have.”  

The Senate roundly rejected a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have preempted all state and local regulations of artificial intelligence. The 99-1 vote against the measure was a rare example of consensus in Washington—one that Manhattan Institute fellow Danny Crichton believes signals an irrational backlash against a revolutionary technology.

Crichton argues that politicians are reacting to voters’ deep-seated fears about the disruptive potential of AI. While he understands these concerns, he believes AI will change rather than eliminate many jobs.

“Productivity increases often require major structural shifts among individuals and societies,” he writes. By striking this provision from the spending package, Congress left those gains on the table.

Read Crichton’s piece here.

Sanity might be making a comeback in the foster-care world. CASA Los Angeles, which supplies advocates to represent children and families in child-welfare cases, has announced the firing of executive director Charity Chandler-Cole, who had been hired to great fanfare just four years ago. But that was a different time, writes Naomi Schafer-Riley, “when someone with Chandler-Cole’s radical politics could rise rapidly to the top of the foster-care world.”

Chandler-Cole has written that the “foster care system . . . mirrors the oppression, discrimination and harassment Black people experience in this country daily,” and she blasted CASA for being “led by white people only” and being dominated by “white savior-ism.”

But now, with the Department of Justice’s announcement that it will slash about $50 million in funding for various CASA organizations, the landscape has changed.

Read Riley’s assessment here.

As Zohran Mamdani’s rise reshapes New York politics, is democratic socialism becoming the Democratic Party’s new base? Host Charles Fain Lehman sits down with Reihan Salam, Judge Glock, and John Ketcham to analyze the political and cultural currents pushing the party leftward—from “Instagram primaries” and “free stuff” populism to the ideological split between the AOC and Ezra Klein factions. Along the way, they dig into anti-institutionalism, social media as a news engine, and the appeal of David Goggins.

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