Roundup
So much news! The following is just the tip of a large iceberg:
(1) Crude oil prices down; stock market up as the markets react to announcements regarding Iran.
(2) Mamdani may be able to get one of his wishes granted: the so-called pied-a-terre tax. Here’s the plan:
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal on April 15 to tax expensive second homes as a sign of a progressive tide to tax the rich, but it will only apply to absentee owners.
The pied-a-terre tax puts an annual surcharge on homes valued above $5 million when there is no resident who lives primarily in New York City. The tax, which would need to be passed in the state’s delayed budget, would generate some $500 million in revenue annually, according to Hochul’s office.
“If you can afford a $5 million second home that sits empty most of the year, you can afford to contribute like every other New Yorker,” Hochul said in a statement. Non-resident owners do not pay New York City’s income taxes. To avoid taxation, property owners could make the home their primary residence or rent it out someone else who does so.
I assume they’re already paying hefty property taxes, aren’t they? So don’t they already “contribute”? I guess they don’t contribute enough for Zohran’s tastes. This would be on top of any property tax. It may also make it harder for the owners to unload the property if they want to sell and escape Mamdani’s clutches.
This quote from the article is unintentionally humorous, in a bleak way:
Hochul, a moderate Democrat up for re-election in November, has been hesitant to raise taxes, which the city cannot do without the state government’s permission.
Hochul is no moderate – except compared to the Communist Mamdani.
Oh, and this from him is pretty funny, too – because he was raised as a “global elite” by parents who definitely were:
We are one step closer to balancing our budget by taxing the ultra-wealthy and global elites with a pied-a-terre tax — the first of its kind in our state,
(3) ICE agents charged in Minnesota:
At a Thursday press conference, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced that her office had issued a nationwide arrest warrant for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of pointing a gun at two motorists on a Minneapolis highway during Operation Metro Surge. Gregory Morgan Jr. of Temple Hills, Maryland, faces two counts of second-degree assault in the Feb. 5 incident.
Details of the incident at the link. Moriarty is Soros-backed, as you might imagine.
Also:
According to the New York Times, it is extremely unusual for a state government to arrest a federal law enforcement officer for on-duty actions.
Ya think?
(4) Is Democrat Senator Ruben Gallego next?
Luna told CBS News’ “The Takeout with Major Garrett” that the Arizona Democrat was the previously unnamed senator whom she said was facing “very disturbing” allegations in a cryptic social media post earlier this week.
A Gallego spokesperson told CBS News on Thursday: “These are right wing conspiracy theories being parroted by a fringe far right member of Congress. Senator Gallego has not received notification or been contacted by the ethics committee.” …
Luna said “there is a woman that allegedly is coming forward with attorneys [and] wants to go on-record about an incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time, and the event was sexual in nature, allegedly.”
Pressed for further details, Luna added that “I think any time that you are knowingly engaging in purchasing someone for sex, that that is something that should be taken seriously.”
Gallego has strongly denied wrongdoing in recent days. He told reporters earlier this week he has never engaged in any sexual misconduct …
Gallego was best buddies with Swalwell.
(5) Perhaps true?:
????? ???? ?????? ???? ?????????? ?????????? ?? ??????? ?????????? ???????? ?? ?????? ???????? ???? ??????
“??? ?? ???? ???? ??? ???? ????? ??? ?? ???… pic.twitter.com/AXdIjtS0wu
— M.A. Rothman (@MichaelARothman) April 17, 2026
(6) While we’re at it, this article is from ten days ago:
A review by Iran International of citizen reports and source material found that, in about one month after the war began, at least 130 sites tied to internal repression were destroyed or hit.
They included 57 Basij buildings or bases, 43 police (FARAJA) facilities, 10 Revolutionary Guards compounds, and 11 security complexes involved in repression. Other targets included judicial buildings and the state broadcaster, institutions that helped complete the chain through prosecutions, propaganda and coerced confessions.
Iran International sources also put the toll among security forces at nearly 5,000 dead and about 21,000 wounded. …
The targets were not only militarily useful. Many were symbols.
Please read the whole thing. I don’t know anything about the reliability of the source, however.
No 5 and 6 – more is needed. I guess I am a Warmonger, I want the “peace talks” to collapse. I want more bombing.
Hochul’s plan to tax the ultra wealthy in NYC is disturbingly reminiscent of the Bolshevik campaign to seize the wealth (e.g., grain, livestock, etc) of Ukrainian farmers — which was the proximate cause of the Holodomor. It is blatant class warfare, textbook Leninism. A kind of latter-day Red Terror.
The immediate goal of the Bolsheviks was to feed the big cities. New York City serves as analog for Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, etc. But the ultimate goal was to collectivize Ukrainian agriculture and thereby establish dominance over the people of Ukraine. .. to teach those people a lesson on who was boss.
I’m not entirely sure how Tousi guy is getting his information and his video, but I’ve watched him for awhile now, and if what he shares is true, it’s wonderfully bleak for the Iranian regime.
2) “New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal on April 15 to tax expensive second homes”
Well, that’s quite an incentive to come back to New York.
3) Presumably the ICE Agent was in pursuit of a fleeing illegal criminal(s). Does Federal law forbid a federal agent from pointing a gun at fleeing illegal criminals when no lesser means of apprehension is available?
If a federal agent’s actions are legal under federal law, then are not contrary state laws null and void? Hopefully the redoubtable Harmeet Dhillon will find a legal way to deal with Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.
‘Moriarty? The game is afoot Watson!’
they should stop drawing straws,
the whole gallegos race was very sketchy, as we noted back in 2024, there have been investigation into shenanigans in maricopa county underway
yes gannett is unintentionally amusing witch hochul, is no moderate, well she was cuomo’s partner in devastation,
‘bread and justice’ was Fidel’s promise, unsurprisingly there was little of either, when he was through, Cenk’s nephew Piker is decidely of the same view*
*he said recently those who escaped the hell, that Fidel imposed were cowards,
had the communist taken over in Turkey, his whole brood would probably have been liquidated rather early in the game,
the orchestrated famine not only struck in ukraine but also in kazakhstan, although there was no high apparatchik that made up the sticky pole like Brezhnev
when the cat has ‘redeployed’ as with many of the surged agents, the mice will play, i’m sure the kangaroo court has ear muffs, hennepin county has shown itself notorious on these matters, like with the somall cop and officer chauvin,
to the extent internal resistance gets the credit, the IRGC reduces its efforts looking over their shoulders for Mossad. And vice versa, should Mossad want the credit.
Arming resistance fighters has a long history
A LOOK AT WHAT WAS DROPPED ‘BEHIND GERMAN LINES’ INTO OCCUPIED FRANCE (PHOTOS)
Allied aircraft including those shown at the Operation Carpetbagger exhibit at the National Air Force Museum above, dropped over 20,495 containers and 11,174 packages of vital supplies to the resistance forces in western and northwestern Europe in 1944 and 1945 alone ranging from batteries and radios to guns and explosives
https://www.guns.com/news/2016/12/13/a-look-at-what-was-dropped-behind-german-lines-into-occupied-france-photos
Geoffrey, the LI post that Neo linked has a fairly detailed description of the incident though it is given from the perspective of the DA’s charging document.
I don’t believe they were pursuing a suspect but reading a bit between the lines, especially that the complainant makes an admission they attempted to cut the ICE vehicle off as it was being driven on the road shoulder, makes me think the ICE agents were attempting to get around the same sort of rolling roadblock that Rebecca Goode was leading.
The immediate goal of the Bolsheviks was to feed the big cities.
They sold the grain on the international market. The Ukrainians weren’t the only ones who died of starvation.
Ooh, “what a good idea”, the tax on empty…$5 million houses tax, in nyc.
My solution, I I owned such a house- sell that house to [anyone, or any company], for what I paid for it…or more, + then LEAVE NYC forever.
Ta ta, New York City.
Chuck said: “They sold the grain on the international market. The Ukrainians weren’t the only ones who died of starvation.”
Yes, they did that too — eventually. This was done to generate capital for industrialization, e.g. building factories, steel mills, electric power plants, etc. But, as stated, the first and immediate purpose of the confiscations was to channel food to the big cities, which was where the core of Bolshevik power was located . . . where the “industrial proletariat” lived. The men and women workers needed to be fed in order for the Bolshevik program for industrialization to function and succeed. It was a very cynical and ruthless choice on the part of the Bolshevik leadership: they prioritized the workers, the industrial proletariat, over the agrarian sector of the population. This was the purest form of Marxist-Leninism in action. Marx never really understood the role that the rural population could or should play in his plans for societal change. Neither did Lenin. The Bolshevik leaders knew only that they had to provide the food that would feed the workers. They also knew that the only way he could get sufficient quantities of food was to take it by force from the farmers. And if a few, or a great many, of the farmers and their families died in the process — well, that was the breaking eggs part of making the Soviet omelet.
Of course it wasn’t just Ukrainians who starved. But Ukrainians suffered more than any other group. They died in greater numbers than any other ethnicity.
@ IrishOtter49 > ” And if a few, or a great many, of the farmers and their families died in the process — well, that was the breaking eggs part of making the Soviet omelet.”
I guess it never occurred to any of these brilliant socialists that there would not be enough farmers left to raise the next year’s crops.
Same kind of second-order-thinking deficiency that we see in our own socialists raised to positions of power.
As soon as you see the Right wing conspiracy smoke, there has to be a fire there.
And Mamdani is looking for the next Kulaks to round up
Apparently NYC tax authorities are also harassing people who only are in the city part of the year (so they don’t have to pay NY taxes). They are demanding cell phone records, for example. The burden of proof is on the individual. So this pied-a-terre tax is another end run to get tax money out of people who are otherwise not subject to some NY taxes (as noted, they still pay property taxes).
Besides income taxes, another reason people leave the city and state is the NY estate tax. It kicks in at (I believe) $5 million, and taxes the entire estate at something like 20 percent. So if you have an estate of $4.99 million the tax is zero. At $5 million the tax is $1 million.
The city’s “mansion” tax works the same way, applying to sales of a home for $1 million or more. (I put mansion in quotes, as a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan typically sells for more than $1 million.) No tax if it sells for $999,000, but a tax on the full $1 million if it sells for that.
Three bling mice.
Three blind mice.
See how they run.
See how the run.
…..
Cut off thier tails with an airborne strike.
They never saw such a sight in their lives.
Three blind mice.
Three blind mice.
See how they r… kaboom.
An ongoing job, an evolving song.
Ideally, each piece of real property is assessed biennially and all parcels outside of slums and points adjacent are subject to the same levy rate on assessed valuation. In the more impecunious bloc groups, the levy rate would be 0% and in the neighborhoods adjacent it would be 1/2 the standard rate. Not seeing the benefit of making the property tax code more complicated than that. Local governments would be liable and would net out their obligations to each other with a transfer payment supplied, the state government would pay levies on its own property and on federal property, and philanthropies would pay taxes to local authorities with a line of credit and then apply to the state treasury for full re-imburdsement. All other parties pay out of their assets and income.
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My wager about the pied-a-terre tax is that it is some sort of Trojan horse. Cannot imagine what he actually has in mind.
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Ideally, the local offices in New York which administer various programs (among them Medicaid) would be incorporated into departments of the state government and financed out of state revenues. Counties and consortia of counties would operate the child protective and foster care service along with allied functions like protective services for the addled and infirm. Counties and municipalities might out of their general revenues operate miscellaneous local programs which are permitted within the terms of their enabling legislation but neither required nor promoted by the state. The mandated programs (child protective, &c) might be subject to occasional performance audits and the poor performers among them placed under state trusteeship, but their would be no specific budgetary mandates.
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Again, ideally, you have no program-specific state grants. You have a general revenue sharing grant for counties and you have one for school districts. The total sum distributed would be at the discretion of the legislature, but a constitutional or statutory formula of distribution would dictate the share of the whole received by each party. County governments would then make a like distribution to their constituent municipalities. These grants would then be supplemented by local revenues; each county would have a franchise to impose a value-added tax and a qualified franchise to impose property taxes. Each municipality, school district, and special district authority providing unmetered services would have a franchise to impose property taxes. Municipalities, school districts &c which envelop slum property would have a qualified franchise to impose a value-added tax as well.
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The state government would rely on a value-added tax, a corporation tax, special purpose income taxes, insurance premiums levied on households, a general income tax, a capital gains tax, a gift-and-inheritance tax, and actuarial assessments on businesses (to finance in part workman’s comp and unemployment). They would not have a franchise to lay and collect property taxes.
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Fines, forfeitures, and restitution (at all levels), excises on particular commodities (as a rule), Pigou levies, and unclaimed deposits would be tossed into holding funds whose contents would at the close of the fiscal year be distributed to the general public on a per capita basis. Proceeds from sales of public property would (at all levels) be devoted to debt retirement.
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Some public services are rightly financed out of tolls, fares, and fees – i.e. things analogous to things a customer might buy on the open market, to which one might add fees to delineate a property right or file suit in front of a court or administrative tribunal. In re ordinary public roads, you cannot charge tolls, but you can incorporate a dedicated fund in each municipality and county responsible for road maintenance as well as one appended to the state highway department. The funds would be financed in part by a motor fuels tax collected by the state and distributed to localities on a per-acres-ot-macadam basis; localities could add to them with their general revenues, but not raid them.
New York would benefit from a program to completely dismantle rent control (implemented incrementally), from a program to liquidate public housing stocks (implemented rapidly), and from streamlining procedures to implement evictions and foreclosures. It should not take more than about 70 days (as a rule) to have a deadbeat tenant or vandal tenant removed from your property. A repeal of state anti-discrimination law applicable to the competitive private sector would be helpful.
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Of course, we will see little of that.
What also might be beneficial would be a limit on the franchise of local authorities to make use of land use planning to make categorical restrictions (apart from height limits) on the freedom of property owners to increase density of settlement on property they own. Another thing would be to provide in law for fairly free development of disfavored housing types (halfway houses, group homes, apartments with shared kitchens, boarding houses, SRO hotels, flop houses, and emergency shelters) in impecunious inner city neighborhoods.
Re: NYC “pied-a-terre tax”:
And just like that, the billionaires became kulaks.
It need not be stated that most billionaires did not get that way by being uncreative. I look forward to the solutions they come up with to foil mohamadmani’s economically illiterate proposal. And should he later implement something to counter the work-arounds, I look forward to the “Great Migration” of billionaires out of NYC. They can turn all those newly vacated pieds-a-terres into migrant housing. That’ll generate scads of tax revenue, won’t it? And how about all the developers who will be champing at the bit to build more expensive residential skyscrapers? It is to laugh.
That’s precisely why the Democrats have to retake the White House: so they can plow back all that magic grift into bankrupt Democratic cities and states…and other “deserving” organizations…along with private pockets!
(Destruction all the way down!)
If any confirmation is needed, just look at their record…IOW “Biden”…
And heeere’s Carville (via Turley)…
‘Democrats are discussing plans after retaking power to change the system so they never lose it again. Carville (curiously on a national podcast) told Democrats to keep the plans quiet: “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” …’
https://instapundit.com/790564/
One thing that really “boils my blood” about the pied-a-terre tax is not just the tax itself; but the manner in which Mamdani brags about it on the local media here in the NYC area – not unlike a thief bragging to other thieves about a recent crime he committed.
No shame whatsoever; and I mean Mamdani as well as those who voted for him because they want this.