New York Marks America’s 250th With Turn to Taxation Without Representation

The governor of New York and the mayor of New York City are joining together in America’s 250th birthday year to back a plan for taxation without representation—precisely the injustice that the United States of America was founded to oppose.

Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who some had hoped would serve as a moderating influence on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old socialist, used the April 15 tax filing deadline to announce a tax on people who own property in New York City but who are not New York City residents for income tax purposes.

“This is a targeted surcharge on second homes and investor-owned apartments worth over $5 million; homes that in many cases sit vacant for a large part of the year,” Hochul said. “Those people are not part of our city.”

“The people who own these pied-à-terres are not contributing in the same way that the 8.3 million New York residents do,” Hochul claimed.

The people who own these properties are not New York City voters or in some cases even New York State voters, though they do pay property taxes already; if their primary residence is in Florida and they vote there, they don’t even have the ability to elect the New York politicians who are imposing taxes on them. That was precisely the same position that the North American colonists were in in the 1760s and 1770s when the British Parliament—where the colonies were not represented—were imposing taxes on the colonists. The colonists likened it to slavery and fought a revolution over it. The Declaration of Independence issued in July 1776 referred to it as “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”