"Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary took one look at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's proposed 9.5% property tax hike and offered him a trophy. Within 12 to 18 months, O'Leary predicted, he'd meet the mayor in Miami and hand him the "Real Estate Agent of the Year" award.
O'Leary called the proposal "bat cuckoo crazy" during a Tuesday evening appearance on CNN's "NewsNight."
He wasn't angry. He was gleeful. And that's the part New York should worry about.
Mamdani's $127 billion Fiscal Year 2027 preliminary budget assumes a 9.5% property tax rate increase, generating $3.7 billion. The mayor described the property tax increase as a contingency if state lawmakers do not approve his broader tax proposals, calling the hikes "the options of last resort, options that we will only employ if there is no other means of arriving at a balanced budget."
Translation: give me the power to tax millionaires, or I'll tax everyone.
According to The New York Post, the proposal would raise property taxes on an estimated 3 million residential units and more than 100,000 commercial buildings. It also calls for drawing down $980 million from the city's Revenue Stabilization Fund in 2026 and $229 million from the Retiree Health Benefits Trust in 2027.
That's the rainy day fund and the retiree health fund. Gone. To paper over a single budget year.
Even with the tax hike baked in, the city's own budget documents still project out-year shortfalls of $6.7 billion in 2028, $6.8 billion in 2029, and $7.1 billion in 2030. So the pain is immediate and the relief is temporary. The math never balances because the spending never stops.
Mamdani framed his budget as presenting two paths. His preferred route: "raising taxes on the wealthiest and corporations," and if Albany won't deliver that, "the City will be forced to go down a second, more harmful path of property taxes and raiding our reserves."
The plan includes a two percent tax on the city's wealthiest residents or, failing that, the sweeping 9.5% property tax hike on homes and businesses alike. One observer on social media captured the choice perfectly: Mamdani offers two paths. Raise taxes, or raise taxes.
Mamdani ran on a platform of making New York more affordable, and less than two months into his first term, he's proposing massive property tax increases and threatening to raid the city's reserves. The man who campaigned on affordability just proposed the largest property tax increase in over two decades. There's no spin that squares that circle.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin and Finance Committee Chair Linda Lee signaled strong resistance, saying in a joint statement: "At a time when New Yorkers are already grappling with an affordability crisis, dipping into rainy day reserves and proposing significant property tax increases should not be on the table whatsoever."
Comptroller Mark Levine called it "a pretty extreme option on the table, which is a combination of raising property taxes and taking money from reserves and relying on some pretty aggressive revenue projections to boot."
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said: "Under no circumstance should we consider balancing our budget on the backs of working-class New Yorkers, especially seniors on fixed incomes and public sector workers who keep our city running."
When the comptroller, the City Council speaker, the governor, and borough presidents all reject your first budget, you haven't proposed a plan. You've issued a ransom note.
Back on CNN, O'Leary wasn't just performing. He complained that "everybody from New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts is moving into my neighborhood" in Miami Beach and that "this guy's just doing more of it."
When host Abby Phillips told the enthusiastic O'Leary to stop yelling, he shot back: "I'm not mad about it, I'm excited, because I want you to pay, not me."
"The View" co-host Ana Navarro sided with O'Leary, warning that wealthy New Yorkers would simply find loopholes or leave: "When you put a hike on taxes just on the very wealthy, you run the risk of those very wealthy not paying it because they'll find a way to have a loophole and skirt those taxes, even if it means moving to Indian Creek (Florida) and living in a billionaire's bunker."
Navarro's observation points to something Mamdani's plan structurally ignores. It's not the person making a million dollars a year who relocates. It's the person making $50 million who considers moving to avoid the tax hike entirely. And when that person leaves, so does every dollar of revenue the budget was counting on.
Mamdani's $127 billion budget proposal represents roughly a $9 billion increase from the current fiscal year's budget, a jump the mayor attributes to past under-budgeting. Every mayor in the city's history has blamed the previous administration. Mamdani's twist is blaming his predecessor while proposing to spend vastly more.
He has said he's unwilling to cut further, despite announcing plans to hire more workers and increase NYPD spending on FIFA World Cup security preparations. Andrew Rein of the Citizens Budget Commission pushed back on the entire framing, saying: "It's false to think they are the only two choices. The best option: dig into the agencies, identify spending that is helping New Yorkers and keep it, identify spending that is not helping New Yorkers and shrink it."
That's the option conspicuously absent from Mamdani's "two paths." Spending discipline. The one tool a Democratic Socialist will never reach for.
Mamdani continued to blame the budget gap on underbudgeting from former Mayor Eric Adams, saying the resulting gaps were larger than those during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. But Adams is gone. The budget is Mamdani's now. And his answer to a spending crisis is to spend $9 billion more and dare Albany to fund the difference.
O'Leary's "Real Estate Agent of the Year" joke works because it describes a pattern that's already in motion. High earners have been leaving New York for years. Tax Foundation data, Census Bureau numbers, and U-Haul pricing trends all tell the same story. Policies like these accelerate the departure of exactly the tax base the city needs to fund everything else.
Mamdani's budget assumes $3.7 billion from a property tax hike. It assumes wealthy residents will stay put, keep earning, and keep paying. It assumes commercial landlords will absorb the hit rather than pass it along to tenants or exit. Every one of those assumptions bets against human nature.
Hochul, who is up for re-election this year, will not want to let the city go down the property tax route with the city's voter-rich support on the line. So Mamdani may get his preferred option after all: not a property tax hike, but a millionaire tax that Albany authorizes on his behalf. Either way, New York's tax burden grows. The spending never shrinks. And the exodus O'Leary described keeps gaining passengers.
Kevin O'Leary will keep the trophy polished.
