After a sportswriter wrote a book about him that he hated, legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight fired off a string of nasty insults.
In response, author John Feinstein delivered a comeback for the ages when he said: “One day he calls me a whore, then a pimp. I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”
Apart from the name-calling, I’m developing a similar feeling about Gov. Hochul on the crucial issue of taxes.
One day she’s opposed to raising them, then suddenly switches sides and argues for big hikes with equal conviction.
Sometimes I wish she would make up her mind, but then I feel like a fool because she clearly has.
She’s fundamentally a supporter of high taxes, but occasionally and briefly argues against them when she believes it will help her politically.
Otherwise, the higher the better is her bottom line because, like most of her Albany colleagues, she loves spending other people’s money.
Her pretense of moderation is being shredded forever by her latest plan to soak the rich with a pied-à-terre tax, which would be an annual surcharge on properties in the city valued at $5 million or more that are not occupied as a primary residence.
The move is part of Hochul’s desperate bid to curry favor with the new cool kid in town, Mayor Mamdani, and his legions of leftist fellow travelers.
Her zigzagging has been notorious since she became governor in August 2021.
The record ever since is one of constant flip-flopping in search of an identity and political gold.
‘Get outta town’
During her 2022 campaign against GOP opponent Lee Zeldin, Hochul, in what had started as a routine public appearance, suddenly demanded that Republicans “just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, OK.
“Get outta town. Get outta town. Because you don’t represent our values. You are not New Yorkers,” she told a shocked audience.
Hyperpartisanship like that, along with a failure to recognize how important rising crime was to voters, almost cost her the election.
Zeldin came so close that Republicans picked up enough House seats to help give the GOP a narrow national majority.
Nonetheless, Hochul saw her victory as a license to govern as a blue state leftist and hasn’t met a spending idea she didn’t embrace.
The budget she inherited was $212 billion, but this year’s is certain to exceed $270 billion.
Florida, which has about 3 million more people than New York, manages to make do with a measly $117 billion.
Yet after Donald Trump provided a wake-up call by getting 43% of the New York state vote in his 2024 election, Hochul put her finger in the wind again and decided that more tax hikes wouldn’t fly this year.
So there she was last month, practically begging the former New Yorkers in Florida she had ordered to leave to please come back and bring their money with them.
“I need people who are high-net-worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state,” she said.
“Now, there are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. OK, cut me the checks if you want to be supportive. But maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who we can bring back home because our tax base has been eroded.”
In her clumsy, backhanded way, she was acknowledging that New York is suffering the largest flow of out-migration and is actually declining in population, especially among high earners.
‘Demonizing is risky’
While her March comments suggested Hochul would approach this campaign with a tighter fiscal focus, she abruptly switched sides again, and has been on the prowl for something or someone to tax.
Her latest decision reflects the Mamdani effect, where he ran and won City Hall on a campaign of higher taxes on the rich and more free stuff for everyone else.
He pushed Hochul to hike taxes on wealthy residents and corporations, but fearing she would lose the race, she searched for an alternative.
Last week, she offered up the pied-à-terre tax as a sacrifice to the Socialist gods.
She aimed to raise $500 million for her new idol, and didn’t give a fig about details.
She did not offer any ideas about what the surcharge would be or how she arrived at the $500 million target.
Her pitch reflects how much and how fast New York politics have changed, with the governor now running on a platform featuring tax hikes, which used to be the third rail.
True to form, Mamdani embraced the tax plan and did a tasteless video outside the Central Park South building where billionaire Ken Griffin spent $230 million for an apartment.
Pointing to Griffin’s penthouse, Mamdani declared that, “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Today, we’re taxing the rich.”
He gloated that the pied-á-terre tax is “specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don’t actually live here.”
It was left to Sara Eisen, a CNBC anchor, to be the adult in the room and warn that the nasty attacks could backfire.
She said Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, a large international investment company, “employs thousands of people in NYC” and is “investing billions more and creating thousands more jobs.”
Eisen noted that “making him feel unwelcome and demonizing him seems risky.”
Naturally, and pathetically, Hochul joined Mamdani’s call for class warfare.
She too “otherized” wealthy owners by saying they are “part of our skyline, but those people are not part of our city.”
She also talked with disdain about “Russian oligarchs buying up properties,” without offering any examples.
Inconvenient facts
The degrees of ignorance in her comments about the city’s economy, development and property taxes are stunning.
Large investments in city real estate, whether from Americans or foreigner buyers, help to create jobs here in banks, construction and design, service, entertainment and retail.
Why demonize the people who make those investments?
Moreover, the owners of the so-called vacant apartments, even if they are corporations, trusts or limited liability companies, already pay large sums of real estate taxes to the city.
The problem is that City Hall spends far too much, and Mamdani already faces a budget deficit of about $12 billion over two fiscal years.
The gaps are so large that Wall Street rating agencies have downgraded the city’s outlook from stable to negative.
But Hochul and her Boy Wonder partner are not interested in inconvenient facts.
They are on a drunken ideological bender where rich and successful people are viewed as inherently evil and fair targets for class warfare.
They better sober up before they kill the golden goose.
