New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran on an expansive affordability agenda that would be paid for by higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.

The democratic socialist's vision will be tough to realize, though, because any tax hikes would have to be approved by the New York State legislature and tax hike-averse Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). Local tax practitioners are emphasizing this political reality to worried clients who called and emailed in a hurry after Mandani won the Nov. 4 mayoral contest.

“There’s been kind of some demystifying as to how can or how will the mayor be able to make these ideas or proposals law," Jeremy Gove, a state and local tax counsel at Eversheds Sutherland, tells Bloomberg Tax editor Benjamin Freed on this week's episode of the Talking Tax podcast. "Explaining this to taxpayers is what we’ve been tackling over the past week or so.”

Gove says that while higher taxes could compel some New York companies and wealthy individuals to decamp for lower-tax states, there's also a "wait and see" sentiment prevailing. Taxpayers might even welcome some proposals from Mamdani, such as hiring more auditors to clear out the Department of Finance's hefty case backlog, he says.

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