From Fox News: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson warns that finances in the nation’s third most populous city have “reached a point of no return.”
The mayor said this week that the city will need to take steps to deal with looming budget shortfalls and that key systems that Chicago provides, including education, housing, health care and transportation, are “woefully underfunded.”
Eight-hundred miles to the east, there are concerns in the nation’s most populous city that if democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani wins the election in November as New York City’s next mayor, the city could be headed for a fiscal abyss similar to the crisis half a century ago, when it came close to bankruptcy.
Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the 2025 race for New York City’s Democratic Party mayor nomination and who is running for re-election as an independent, struck a deal with the city council on a roughly $116 billion budget for fiscal year 2026.
Mamdani, 33, an immigrant from Uganda who only became a U.S. citizen in 2018, is a Shia Muslim and a Democrat Socialist. He supports New York City’s sanctuary laws, and has declared that if he is elected mayor, the city will provide legal services for all illegal aliens in detention proceedings.
Mamdani has proposed a long list of free services he wants to make available in New York, all at taxpayer expense, including:
- No fares for New York City’s vast bus system
- Make CUNY (City University of New York) “tuition-free”
- Freeze rents on municipal housing
- free childcare for children up to age 5
- Establishing government-run grocery stores
- Build more government owned “affordable housing”
To pay for all the freebies he is promising, Mamdani has proposed a 2% income tax increase on city residents who earn more than $1 million a year – which critics fear will cause the wealthy to flee from New York.
But all one has to do is look to Chicago to realize that concept isn’t working out so well. Nolan Beverly wrote:
After reading about the mismanagement of Chicago’s budget under Mayor Brandon Johnson, it’s disheartening to see the city facing a deficit. It’s frustrating that the governor allowed this overspending of our tax dollars. Johnson claims there’s no revenue shortfall, but endless spending on migrants never generates a return.
Now he’s promising to tax Chicago’s millionaires and billionaires, which sounds like complete nonsense. We know the rich often get tax breaks while the working class bears outrageous tax burdens. Let’s not forget how Chicago’s ticket system and traffic laws disproportionately burden the middle class. Why are Democrats so bad with money, and why do taxpayers always suffer the most? To my fellow Chicago taxpayers, I’m sorry, but voting for a DEI-focused failure has consequences.
After reading about the mismanagement of Chicago’s budget under Mayor Brandon Johnson, it’s disheartening to see the city facing a deficit. It’s frustrating that the governor allowed this overspending of our tax dollars. Johnson claims there’s no revenue shortfall, but endless…
— Nolan Beverly (@NolannBeverly) August 8, 2025
Chicago’s budget shortfall puts spotlight on Mamdani’s ‘socialism’ agenda for New York City https://t.co/y6WR9l0ib2
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 8, 2025
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