Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
New York’s Spending Crisis, Housing Unaffordability, & Conspiracy Corner: 9/11, Epstein, TV Producer Of Tehran Woes | Tom Bilyeu Show Live
20 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What are the key issues surrounding New York's spending crisis?
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Mamdani had a rude awakening over in NYC. It took Zoran Mamdani exactly 47 days to propose a tax increase on the very people he promised to protect. 47 days from freeze the rent as a chant to a 9.5% property tax hike on 3 million homes. Now to understand just how absurd this is, you've got to understand the specifics.
New York City's budget in the year 2000, okay, so just 26 years ago, in the year 2000, New York City's budget was $36.5 billion, okay?
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Chapter 2: How are property taxes affecting residents in New York City?
It's a lot of money, but Understandable. That covered all 8 million people living in the city at the time. That's roughly $4,500 per person. Yesterday, Mamdani unveiled a $127 billion preliminary budget for all of the people that now live in New York. And how many extra people have they added in the last 26 years? Did it go up by the same roughly 3.5x that the budget went up by?
No, there are currently roughly 8.5 million people living in New York. That's an increase of roughly half a million people, which is a population growth of only about 6.5%. The budget, however, grew by a staggering 248%. That is a ludicrous $14,941 per person. Spending per person didn't keep pace with inflation. It tripled. So everything must be three times better, right?
In 2017, 51% of New Yorkers rated their quality of life as excellent or good. Today, that number is 34%. Only 12% think the city spends its money wisely, only 22% feel safe on the subway at night, and felony assaults hit a 24-year high in 2024.
The city spends over $40,000 per student just on education, which is the highest in the country, and yet more than half of New York City kids can't read at grade level. Their own school's chancellor admitted that that's true. They tripled the spending and everything got worse.
Chapter 3: What social and cultural shifts are driving young people towards socialism?
To put this in perspective, Houston only spends $2,900 per person versus 14,000 and change in New York, And Houston, they don't have state income tax, nor do they have city income tax, and their population is growing. New York spends five times more, and 66% of residents say life is getting worse. So where did the extra money go? Pension costs are up 115%.
Outsource contracts ballooned by $7 billion. A brand new $5 billion asylum seeker expense materialized out of thin air. It literally didn't exist just three years ago. Social services spending has doubled, the city employs over 300,000 people, and the debt keeps ballooning. Now, none of that is Mamdani's fault. Let's be very clear. He wasn't in office.
But it does show that more money is not going to solve the problem. but apparently Mamdani is not getting that message. He does not look at all of this and say, we need to spend our money more wisely. Instead, he looks at that cavalcade of failures and he says, we need to spend more and tax more. He laid out his plan to close what is currently a $5.4 billion budget gap
Now, he said to be consistent with his campaigning, his preferred method is to get a 2% income tax hike on anyone making over a million dollars. That would push the combined state and city rate to roughly 16.8%, which would be the highest in the entire United States by a lot. California, the other catastrophe, their top rate at least tops out at 13.3%, which is already ridiculous.
Chapter 4: What are the implications of government spending on housing affordability?
Add federal taxes on top, and you're looking at over 53 cents of every dollar going to the government. And that's before sales tax and stuff like that. Now, Governor Hochul has repeatedly said to Mamdani and anybody else who would listen, she's not going to do an income tax hike. She won't sign it. She's up for reelection, okay? There's no way she's got an appetite for more taxes.
So what is Mamdani's backup plan? It's a 9.5% property tax increase. It's the first one since 2003. It's gonna hit over 3 million residential units and 100,000 commercial buildings. And this is the same guy who won the election by promising to freeze rents. It was his signature campaign promise, the thing he chanted at rallies, freeze the rent, remember?
And now, less than two months into office, the very first major fiscal lever that he reaches for is one that will almost certainly raise rents for the majority of New York City's renters. Now, because roughly 56% of apartments aren't rent stabilized and those landlords will pass the cost straight through to tenants, this is going to be a problem.
For the 44% that are stabilized, landlords obviously can't raise rent, so they'll cut maintenance, delay repairs, and let buildings just deteriorate. I did a deep dive on this. If you look at what happened to New York in the seventies and eighties, it was insane. It inspired movies like escape from New York in the Bronx.
There was some ungodly number of buildings that were burned down because they realized that it was cheaper to burn the building and collect the insurance money than it was to try to upkeep the building. You do not want to put people in that situation.
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Chapter 5: How do regulatory costs impact housing supply in the U.S.?
First of all, they become real slumlords because they don't have the money for the repairs. Now, the small property owners of New York said it very plainly, raising property taxes while freezing rents would be crushing, driving small owners into foreclosure and bankruptcy. I know everybody thinks that all of these buildings are owned by Megacorps, but they're not.
Mamdani himself admitted that this problem is real. He said this would effectively be a tax on working and middle-class New Yorkers. Those are his own words. The man who ran an affordability is now proposing a regressive tax that his own comptroller called something that's going to hit communities of color harder than wealthy neighborhoods. And he's doing that instead of what?
Instead of making budget cuts. All right, there's an even deeper problem. His supporters are gonna chant stuff like tax the rich at rallies, but the top 1% of filers already pay 40% of the city's income taxes, and they're leaving now. New York City's share of the nation's millionaires has dropped. They used to be, what, 6.5%, they're now 4.2%. That's a drop of 35%, just over a decade.
More than 125,000 New Yorkers have fled to Florida in the last few years, taking nearly $14 billion in income with them. These people have accountants, boys and girls. They have options. They've got Florida. You know who can't leave though? Normal people, people that own a house, people that own a small business.
Chapter 6: What controversies surround the casting of Joan of Arc in Hollywood?
They are stuck left there to deal with more taxes. And this- Nobody owns houses in businesses, Tom. Drew, if actually, if that were true, that would be a catastrophe. But alas, they do. This is fundamental math that ultimately democratic socialists are gonna have to deal with, so.
Margaret Thatcher said it best when she said, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. So we'll see how this plays out. But when you've got Mamdani's entire agenda, free buses at $800 million a year, city-owned grocery stores, universal child care, a four-year rent freeze, all of it was predicated on his ability to tax the rich to pay for it.
But the rich are leaving. The governor won't authorize the tax. And the budget still, by law, has to be balanced. So who pays? The middle class, the working class, the exact people that he promised to protect. This is the game of socialism, boys and girls. So you can call it democratic socialism if you want. It is the same idea. New York does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem.
And until some mayor somewhere has the courage to say that out loud, to actually cut the waste, reform pensions, renegotiate contracts, and stop treating taxpayers like they're an infinite ATM, no amount of taxing will ever be enough. This is why the federal government
Chapter 7: How does the episode analyze the Epstein files and their implications?
has deficits of trillions of dollars. There's no point at which your spending can be out of control and you're able to tax people enough. Just doesn't work. You first have to get your spending under control. You have to cut things. And I get that people don't want to do it, but it is the only way forward. You will forever run into the realities of math.
This is a tough one, because the largest driver of the budget is pensions, healthcare costs. Yep, guess what you have to cut? Pensions and healthcare costs. There you go. Man, so you wrote that to the city, but sorry, the city can't afford you anymore. Goodbye and good luck.
Yes, people have got to understand, you cannot make everything free, you can't. There are going to be some places that are expensive to live. It just is the way that it is. And if you want a cheaper life, you have to go to a cheaper place. And if then that place finds, oh, like we're losing people, then they will stop doing moronic policies.
And if they really want workers like if you're a really wealthy person in New York and you are like, whoa, what do I do? There's nobody here to help me do my laundry, walk my dog, whatever your thing is.
Chapter 8: What conspiracy theories are discussed regarding 9/11 and Epstein?
Well, then you better build more housing. but they're not doing that. They're taking this ridiculous, completely moronic approach and they're paying the consequences. So people have done, there are physics to this stuff.
Like you may want to, let's say that you make race cars and you're trying to win and you may want a particular design that looks cool to be the fastest, but aerodynamics are real and you have to adhere to the realities of physics. Your tires have to be a certain way. because road conditions are a certain way. Aerodynamics work a certain way. Drivers work a certain way.
And if you want to build against a theory, that theory is going to make contact with reality at some point. And that's why I say all of this stuff comes back to having a federal reserve. When people can print money, when they can do things at a deficit, they don't have to be responsible. At some point, we have to admit you cannot pay for everything. And so If you're gonna do a new thing, great.
Like I actually don't, if New York says, we wanna offer free housing to everybody who makes less than $75,000. I don't have a philosophical problem with it. Just show me what you're not gonna do to pay for that. And if taxpayers are like, yeah, I'm cool with that. Great, what the fuck is the problem? You're saying, hey, my tax base doesn't mind this. So they're happy to fork over.
They're not leaving. Cool. This is a thing we all agree as New Yorkers, we wanna spend our taxpayer dollars on. Great. It's when you want to do something that is not popular with the people that pay 40 percent of your tax base. And this is not a communist country. We're not under a dictatorship. So people can and will leave. And by the way, the states compete for population through tax policies.
And they just blind that. So it's like you basically compete on weather, safety, education and tax. And that's as a state, you're like, hey, we want to be friendly to business. Cool. Hey, we want to be the best place for education. So we attract parents. Hey, we want lower taxes, whatever. But like you're competing on something that people really care about.
And it's a very small number of things that people care about enough to pick up their whole family and move. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead. So don't go anywhere. Every SIM card has a permanent ID. It's called an IMSI. Your carrier assigns it once and it never changes. That ID follows you everywhere.
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