Willie Sutton was famously asked why he robbed banks. His answer was illuminating: Because that’s where  the money is. And that lesson has been taken to heart by New York City’s new Democratic Socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose plan to fund his initiatives and  close the budget gap is to tax the rich. Why? Because that’s where the money is.

State lawmakers in New York are considering several proposals to tax the rich, including a tax on luxury second homes and changes to a tax credit favored by the wealthy.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s preferred option — raising personal income taxes for millionaires — has support in the State Assembly and Senate, and is backed by more than 60 percent of New York City voters. But Gov. Kathy Hochul firmly opposes the idea.

For the egalitarian, the propriety of taxing the rich is obvious. They can afford it. Their good fortune, rather than sacrifice and effort, is the primary root of their wealth. Others are suffering for lack of funds and critical resources, so why shouldn’t the wealthy pony up a bit more so that life can be better for “everyone”?

The mayor’s plan is simple: increase the city income tax rate by two percentage points for those who earn $1 million per year or more, from 3.88 percent to 5.88 percent — the equivalent of a 51 percent increase. Doing so could raise an additional $3 billion in revenue annually.

A household that earns $1 million per year would pay $20,000 more in city taxes, while one earning $10 million per year would pay $200,000 more. The plan would affect about 34,000 households, a group that is small but important to the city budget.

What remains unspoken is that the wealthy, assuming you consider a million per year wealthy in New York, already pay far more than their share of the cost of running the Big Apple, paying 37% of NYC tax revenue. There are a lot of people in the city who fall below the income tax threshold, and somebody has to pay for their use of city facilities.

But there remain two questions. First, will it work? Taxes in New York are extremely high, closing in on confiscatory, and yet they aren’t enough to cover the ever-increasing nut. Raising taxes would be one thing if spending was either cut or, at the very least, remained the same. But neither New York history nor tradition suggests that’s going to happen. What seem far more likely is that taxes are raised, filling one gap, only to have new initiatives create the next gap requiring . . . more taxes!  And wealthy New Yorkers know something about taxes.

New York City already has the nation’s highest income taxes for the highest earners, with households that make more than $25 million per year paying a combined state and city rate of 14.78 percent. Some experts worry about the effects of raising taxes further.

Second, if taxes increase, will the wealthy reach their breaking point and call it quits? Will they move outside the city? Will they sell their pied-a-terre? While the city still offers many advantages in terms of food and culture, one can always visit and only pay the cost of a good meal, a museum donation and a Broadway show. But what of the other exodus?

Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has argued that millionaires can afford to pay more to improve New Yorkers’ quality of life. He said recently that he was more concerned about struggling families leaving the city because they could not afford to stay than he was about the possibility that rich New Yorkers would depart.

“For all of that conversation about this imagined exodus, we have to reckon with the very real exodus that we are seeing in this city: an exodus of working-class people,” Mr. Mamdani said.

He’s got a point. All the very expensive, very fancy, very enjoyable aspects of city life rely on workers who do the heavy lifting. Think of a restaurant without servers. That would suck, and those servers have to live somewhere, need daycare for their kids, need public transportation to get to work and need food because they’re human beings. If the wealthy want to enjoy the efforts of the working class, they need to do their part to keep the working class in New York. If the poor are priced out of the city, who will drive their limos to the Met Gala?

Is raising taxes, whether on income, second (or fifth) homes or both, the solution to New York City’s affordability woes, or is it the straw that breaks the city’s back? If it happens, will this be the end of it or the start of the next round of dreamworks? And much as there are few advocates for the poor, downtrodden wealthy, is there anything wrong with accumulating wealth and wanting to keep it? It’s no crime to be poor, but it’s no great honor either. Why pick on the wealthy for having managed, whether by effort or good fortune, to succeed? Isn’t that the American dream?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.

The wisdom of having the Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, do the Sunday morning talk shows was questionable to begin with. He’s not a media personality, like others favored by Trump, and there is little a prosecutor ought to do on television that wouldn’t be more appropriately done in the courtroom. But that didn’t stop Blanche from taking to the airwaves following his indictment of former director of the FBI and enemy of Trump, Jim Comey. It did not turn out well.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, on Sunday sought to contrast the Justice Department’s indictment of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey over a social media post with other instances in which people have shared the same message, saying that the department had gathered additional evidence during an 11-month investigation.

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In what can only charitably be called testimony, Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth responded to a question by Senator Tim Kaine as to the administration’s plans for today. Today is the 60th day after Trump’s notification to Congress that he started a war. According to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, this is that day when the Warfighter-in-Chief must act.

Except Hegseth’s response asserted otherwise.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued Thursday that the Trump administration can continue the Iran war despite a Vietnam-era law that requires Congress’s approval after 60 days of fighting, in an apparent attempt to stave off the rapidly approaching deadline.

His comments came in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee where Hegseth asserted that an ongoing ceasefire between Washington and Tehran “pauses” the countdown.

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Technically, Justice Sam Alito’s 6-3 majority opinion doesn’t kill the Voting Rights Act, as he allowed that Section 2, prohibiting the dilution of minority voting rights by gerrymandering to still be unlawful if it could be proven that the map was drawn with the intention of denying minority citizens opportunity on the basis of race.

To successfully challenge district maps under the Voting Rights Act now, Justice Alito wrote, challengers would need to show evidence supporting “a strong inference” that a state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” A legal challenge that “cannot disentangle race from the state’s race-neutral considerations, including politics,” will fail.

But Alito, following Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Allen v. Milligan, found that times have changed, that distinctions based on race can’t go on forever, and that drawing district lines on the basis of race “collided” with the Constitution. Continue reading →

Some might think that I, as a criminal defense lawyer, would take comfort in the serial failures of the Department of Justice and its United States Attorneys’ offices across the country. The flight of career prosecutors, inability to secure indictments despite the minimal threshold of probable cause, dismissal of case after case, should bring joy to my tribe, right? Except I’m also an American, a law-abiding citizen, and a human being, and crime, per se, is a bad thing. I don’t want people harmed or victims to suffer.

In the past day, two high profile things happened which were so stunningly wrong, so fundamentally, laughably incompetent, as to conclusively demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice (or Trump’s personal machinery for vanity and vengeance) is utterly incompetent. Continue reading →

Not that Jeanine Pirro couldn’t screw up anything she touched, but she looked adamant and sober when she stated, “Make no mistake, this was an attempted assassination of the President of the United States.” Her sentence then continued by directly contradicting this assertion.

The complaint charges Cole Allen with three counts (with more likely to come), the top count being 18 U.S.C. § 1751(c), attempted assassination of the president. The affidavit in support of the complaint relies entirely on a text attachment to an email Allen sent immediately beforehand, which is being called a “manifesto” to dredge up images of Karl Marx and the Unibomber. Continue reading →

Democrats have introduced numerous war powers resolutions in Congress, to no avail. They knew, or should have known, that these bills were performative and had no chance of passing, but they did so to appear to be doing something, anything, to address Trump’s war of choice in Iran. Perhaps it made them feel warm and fuzzy, but it had no effect whatsoever.

By the end of this week, however, it will be a different situation. As of this coming Friday, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 kicks in.

If the war continues through Friday without congressional approval, it will clearly be illegal, having passed the 60-day threshold and the 48-hour notice period that the president is given, under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, to conduct this kind of military operation. Continue reading →

Regardless of how many things one thinks Trump has done poorly, one thing he’s excelled at is taking advantage of his position for personal and familiar financial gain. Hey, everybody has their strengths. One example of this is his suit against the Internal Revenue Service seeking damages in the amount of $10 billion for an employee of a contractor releasing his tax return. Before the Department of Justice answered the complaint or entered an appearance, Trump moved to extend the defendants’ time “so the Parties can “engage in discussions designed to resolve the matter[.]”

Before deciding the motion, Judge Kathleen Williams in the Southern District of Florida raised a very interesting question: Did the court have jurisdiction if there was no legitimate case or controversy? The judge began with a bit of the irony presented by Trump’s suit. Continue reading →

Great Stirrup Cay in the Bahamas is a private island owned largely by the Norwegian Cruise Line family of companies. This is not as glamorous as it sounds.

Let me explain. Back in the day in Appalachia, there were things called “Company Towns.” A very nearby version of one of these towns is called Alcoa, Tennessee (named after the Aluminum Company of America—Alcoa). These towns were completely owned by one company and often paid local workers in what was referred to as “Scrip”—or currency only redeemable in company town businesses. Continue reading →

The question isn’t whether it’s a good thing, or even just fine, that ICE and CBP agents round up random people who appear to be foreigners with neither visible names nor shield numbers such that you can identify who engaged in illegal conduct. Stephen Miller thinks that’s swell, even if Gavin Newsom and others do not. The question is whether the State of California can make it a crime for federal agents to do so within its borders. The Ninth Circuit, unsurprisingly, in an opinion by Judge Mark Bennett, held it cannot.

Section 10 generally mandates the visible display of identification by law enforcement officers operating within the State. See Cal. Penal Code § 13654. It provides that any “law enforcement officer operating in California that is not uniformed . . . shall visibly display identification that includes their agency and either a name or badge number or both name and badge number when performing their enforcement duties.” Id. § 13654(a). “Law enforcement officer” is defined to include “any federal law enforcement officer.” Id. § 13654(d)(2). And “‘[e]nforcement duties’ means active and planned operations involving the arrest or detention of an individual, or deployment for crowd control purposes.” Id. § 13654(d)(1). An officer’s “willful and knowing violation of [§ 10] is punishable as a misdemeanor” under California law. Id. § 13654(c).

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