NYC's Budget Crisis Is NOT What Mamdani Says It Is, Criminalizing Political Dissent Is the Beginning of Dictatorships, Free Healthcare Always Comes With Hidden Trade-Offs | Weekly Recap

Summary

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Impact Theory Podcast – Weekly Recap (May 3, 2026)

Host: Tom Bilyeu
Episode Theme: Deconstructing the narratives around NYC’s budget crisis, the risks of criminalizing political dissent, and the economics of “free” healthcare.

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Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging weekly recap, Tom Bilyeu and co-host Drew unravel some of the week’s biggest political and economic controversies:

• The DOJ’s charges against James Comey for a cryptic social media post and what it means for freedom of speech.
• The logic (and consequences) behind investigating comedians for edgy political jokes.
• The real drivers of New York City’s budget crisis and why, according to Tom, it’s a manufactured problem.
• Why “free” healthcare debates often overlook important trade-offs and economic realities.

Tom’s signature style—direct, energetic, and relentlessly analytical—frames the conversation as a call to look past headlines and memes to fundamental truths.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Criminalizing Dissent and the Slippery Slope for Free Speech

Discussion Start: 00:45

• James Comey Indictment:
  The Department of Justice has charged former FBI Director James Comey with felonies for an alleged veiled threat against the president via a cryptic “seashells 8647” post on X (Twitter).

  • Tom considers this “ridiculous” and a dangerous overreach:

    “If every time somebody says to you get rid of that person, you think they mean to go and kill them, you live in a very different world than I live in. ... Going all the way to indicting a guy for posting seashells that say 86, 47 is crazy.” — Tom Woods, (01:07)

  • Warns about escalation, creating a culture of fear:

    “You become the bad guy so fast, it is very distressing. Use decorum, give grace, give a ton of latitude.” — Tom Woods, (03:34)

• How to Define Incitement:
  Tom draws the line at explicit advocacy of violence:

  “If you say something along the lines of, that person should be killed, somebody should kill that person. ... You’ve got to be saying it like, if you get like 2x clever and ... it should be condemned, but ... we have the First Amendment for a reason.” — Tom Woods, (04:12–04:26)

• Precedent and Political Whiplash:

  “Eventually that case law is going to be interpreted by the person you despise ... This entire decision can get turned 360 in a year.” — Drew, (05:51)
  Takeaway: Laws and prosecutions made for political enemies set everyone up for similar treatment later.

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2. Freedom of Speech, Comedy, and the Kimmel Investigation

Segment Start: 06:10

• Tom pushes back at recent FCC scrutiny of comedian Jimmy Kimmel for a joke about the First Lady, emphasizing that comedians, by design, push boundaries:

  “We should want comedians to point out the most, like, unsayable thing in the world. ... There was nothing in that joke that I think people should go after, because, man, you open that and people are just going to come after the comedians on your side.” — Tom Woods, (06:21–08:01)

  • Asserts cost of free speech is worth it, even at risk:

    “Freedom of speech has a cost and it is well worth paying.” — Tom Woods, (08:01)

• Relating to UK Speech Laws:
  Tom criticizes Britain's even more restrictive approach, noting jail time for opinions or criticism:

  “The UK is a joke. ... It is authoritarian rule. You’re going to destroy your own country. ... You guys look like buffoons. It is absolutely moronic. Immediately stop. That is just so stupid.” — Tom Woods, (08:45)

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3. Social Murder, Health Care Economics, and the Flaws of “It Should Be Free”

Segment Start: 10:40

• Social Murder & Healthcare as a Right:
  Tom reacts to a viral interview with Hasan Piker, where the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO is framed as understandable due to "social murder."

  • Tom breaks down the misconception that health care is an inherent right:

    “He’s putting forward a worldview ... that health care is a right and that an insurance company therefore must exist and that any CEO running a company ... is engaging in social murder. ... It’s patently absurd.” — Tom Woods, (11:04)

  • Points out that profitability is wildly overestimated by the public—insurance companies by law can’t keep more than 20% of premiums (beyond that, must be paid out), undermining the “evil profiteer” myth.

• Risks and Rewards in Innovation:

  “You get to take advantage of [hyper-drivers] only when you create the system that allows people like that to really just go balls to the wall. ... But they will also abuse the system. And one of the ways they abuse the system is regulatory capture.” — Tom Woods, (14:59)

  • He warns that both innovation and abuse come from capitalism, and regulatory capture (lobbying to block competition) ultimately hurts consumers.

• The Government vs. The Market:

  • Tom’s stance: The free market provides better innovation and efficiency than government-run systems, citing Canada’s long waits as an example:

    “When something is free, obviously usage rates go up, up, up, up. This is one of those things where the free market has proven to be far more beneficial at creating these things than the government by orders of magnitude.” — Tom Woods, (18:08)

• The Myth of “Obligation” to Provide Healthcare:

  • Strong stance against the view that people should be forced to work in healthcare for others, likening it to forced labor:

    “Now, each and every person listening ... would never do that. They themselves obviously believe they should have a choice about where they work and what they do. But all of a sudden, when it’s healthcare, it’s like, no, no, no ... get to work. That’s just crazy. ... They’re not slaves and so they can work where they want, on what they want. They are not obligated.” — Tom Woods, (19:17)

• If You Want Free Healthcare, Expect Trade-offs:

  “If we want free healthcare, we can have it, but we’ve got to give something up to get it.” — Tom Woods, (18:08)

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4. NYC’s Budget Crisis—A Manufactured Problem?

Segment Start: 22:00

• Mamdani’s “Budget Crisis” Claims Debunked:
  Tom accuses NYC Council Member Zohran Mamdani of manufacturing the crisis for political gain:

  “He created the budget gap. Let’s be very clear ... if he just went back to the 2025 budget, there’s no shortfall. This is literally man made.” — Tom Woods, (22:42)

• The Real Math:

  • Mamdani’s new budget increases spending by $15B (10–13% jump), which is nearly three times the projected $5.4B deficit.

    “If he wants to balance the budget, all he has to do is hold spending flat at last year’s level and the deficit disappears.” — Tom Woods, (26:33)

  • Cites comparison: Florida’s entire statewide budget is less than NYC’s budget, despite having three times the population.

• Alternatives Ignored:

  • Julie Menon (Democratic City Council Speaker) proposed a deficit fix through unfilled job cuts and smarter contracting—no tax hikes, no service cuts. Mamdani dismissed it as “unrealistic.”

    “[Her plan] closed the gap mostly by re-estimating costs that have been overstated and revenues that have been understated. ... These are the things that Mamdani is saying are unrealistic.” — Tom Woods, (28:13)

  • Blasts the culture where manufactured financial “crises” justify new taxes that inevitably hit the working and middle class:

    “This is how the taxes will precisely get pushed down to the average person. ... Sorry, homeowners, but you guys are going to have to cough up some more. We couldn’t get the wealthy to do it.” — Tom Woods, (31:49)

• The Core Drivers:

  • The real reason for economic hardship? Not socialism vs. capitalism, but debt, deficit spending, and inflation by politicians and central bankers that shrink the “pie” for everyone.

    “If you allow people to deficit spend ... if you allow them to bamboozle you and say that, hey, there’s just nothing we can do other than to generate more revenue, you continue to get this flywheel that makes it harder and harder on the working and middle class.” — Tom Woods, (33:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Boys and girls, the fact that we have indicted James Comey for posting an image of seashells is ridiculous.” — Tom Woods, (01:07)
• “You become the bad guy so fast, it is very distressing. Use decorum, give grace, give a ton of latitude.” — Tom Woods, (03:34)
• “We should want comedians to point out the most, like, unsayable thing in the world. ... Freedom of speech has a cost and it is well worth paying.” — Tom Woods, (08:01)
• “The UK is a joke ... You guys look like buffoons. It is absolutely moronic.” — Tom Woods, (08:45)
• “He created the budget gap. Let’s be very clear ... if he just went back to the 2025 budget, there’s no shortfall. This is literally man made.” — Tom Woods, (22:42)
• “If you say something along the lines of, that person should be killed, somebody should kill that person. ... But if you’re not just out and out saying it, we have the First Amendment for a reason.” — Tom Woods, (04:12–04:26)
• “The reason that people are going so hard to the left and the right ... the pie really is shrinking ... that noble cause is central Bankers and politicians ... deficit spend and steal from everybody by inflating the currency.” — Tom Woods, (33:17)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:45 – DOJ’s Comey indictment, Tom’s reaction on the dangers of criminalizing dissent
• 04:09 – What counts as incitement? The First Amendment line
• 06:10 – FCC investigating comedians: Is it ever justified?
• 08:29 – US and UK: Cracking down on online speech
• 10:40 – “Social murder,” healthcare as a right, and public misunderstanding of economics
• 14:59 – Innovation, regulatory capture, and why the game isn’t fair
• 18:08 – Why free healthcare leads to trade-offs, flawed assumptions about obligation
• 22:00 – Mamdani and NYC budget: Are shortfalls real or rhetorical?
• 26:33 – The numbers behind the budget, Menon’s alternative, why deficits persist
• 33:17 – The deeper drivers of public frustration: debt, deficits, inflation

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Tone & Style

• Direct, analytical, irreverent
• Tom speaks with urgency and occasional sarcasm, especially on “lies” and “absurd” logic.
• Frequent analogies (“knife fight,” “buffoons”) and cultural references (Orwell, the Mafia, Churchill/Hitler)
• Clear preference for personal liberty, skepticism of both left and right political narratives

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Summary Takeaway

Tom Bilyeu’s recap punctures headlines and meme-driven takes, urging listeners to question not only politicians but the assumptions behind entire policy debates. Whether it’s indictments over obscure tweets, the limits of acceptable speech, the truth behind budget “crises,” or the realities of healthcare economics—Tom wants listeners to look for root causes, not political theater. The throughline: Critical thinking and a wide berth for liberty are the keys to thriving amid disruption.

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Transcript

[Tom Woods]

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[Drew]

The DOJ officially charging former FBI director James Comey with two felony counts, knowingly making a threat against the President of the United States and transmitting an interstate communication containing a threat to kill the President. All of this comes from his seashells 8647 post on X. Yeah, carrying each of those charges carry a maximum of 10 years in prison. So he's looking to doing up to 20 years. What's your reaction about James Comey?

[Tom Woods]

Boys and girls, the fact that we have indicted James Comey for posting an image of seashells is ridiculous. There is a reason that we have freedom of speech in America. If somebody reads 8647 as an actual incitement to violence, where they think somebody is going to go from you know, I wasn't going to throw my life away and attempt to kill somebody to now you know what, I am going to throw my life away and attempt to kill somebody based on sin seashells that say 86 47. Also, it's patently absurd to me. The most obvious reading of 86 is to get rid of if every time somebody says to you get rid of that person, you think they mean to go and kill them, you live in a very different world than I live in. So when we think about freedom of speech, we need to be giving the most like wide latitude humanly possible. Now if somebody says like if we're going to point somebody out when what's his name, Hassan Piker says if you don't like whatever you should and he says K I L L Tim Scott. I don't even remember what it was about, but that's pretty direct. So if we're going to let that one slide, posting a picture of seashells saying 8647 is just ridiculous right now. The Trump administration, I absolutely beg you, do not do anything from a legal Lawfare perspective that even has a mild whiff of impropriety. They have come after you relentlessly and stupidly and foolishly and in ways that have just absolutely tarnished their reputation. And if you only go after people that, it's like, okay, this one is obviously really blatant. We cannot let this stand. I was talking about this at the beginning of the show. You have laws, enforce them. But if you start enforcing them to this point, this is where we really start getting draconian. Everybody has to look over their shoulder. Everybody has to be afraid. It starts pushing people harder onto teams because you want the protection and you will lose. People that up to this point haven't been afraid to stand in the middle of the road and say what they think is true. And everybody starts saying what they need to say to be on a party to know that they're going to get protected. That is a terrible place to put everybody. We want everybody in a position where they say what they believe to be true, knowing that they have huge latitude, that if they, like, start veering towards something, that they get checked. Yes, but going all the way to indicting a guy for posting seashells that say 86, 47 is crazy. So this is one where we have got to remind people to pump the brakes. You become the bad guy so fast, it is very distressing. Use decorum, give grace, give a ton of latitude. I get it. This guy's a political enemy. I understand why there's frustration with him. I get it. But if you're going to pursue somebody and not have this rebound back on you when you lose power, you. You want to make sure that you had restraint when the war of looking like the stable person in the room. And right now, man, the Republican Party under Trump does not look like that. So when you've got China looking more restrained than the U.S. god damn. So please, kids, this one is stupid. Don't pursue this.

[Drew]

How would you define incitement to violence, though? Like, if you had to make it

[Tom Woods]

as a policy, if you say something along the lines of, that person should be killed, somebody should kill that person. We know there are people out with guns. Maybe somebody should use them.

[Drew]

Them like, that is explicitly hinting at, like, murder, violence, guns, You've got to

[Tom Woods]

be saying it like, if you. If you get like 2x clever and it's like, okay, well, if you know all the context of that, that is obviously somebody calling for violence. No, like, I get it, I get it. You sent a subliminal message out into the public and it should be condemned, and people should be like, this person is an. And we absolutely shouldn't tolerate that. But if you're not just out and out saying it, we have the First Amendment for a reason. Because you start getting into interpretation. Did not read 8647 as James Comey's. And James Comey, I don't know. The guy don't have pluses or minuses, so I don't give a. But when I read that, I was like, he wants him out of the presidency to make the immediate leap that he wants the president to be murdered. Oh, my God. Like it. A reasonable doubt exists for a reason, and that one has as much reasonable doubt as you could possibly convey. I do not think a reasonable person hears 86 anybody and thinks, oh, they mean kill him. If a Mafia boss goes up to me and says, Yo, 86 this guy, then I might be like, whoa, hey, Mafia boss.

[Drew]

FBI director. This is the. That was the handshaking meme. Yeah. Oh, Jesus.

[Tom Woods]

So, yeah, I think we have to. That. That lands a little too hard, Drew. But, yeah, I do think that we need to be very careful, because eventually that case law is going to be interpreted by the person that you despise,

[Drew]

which is a despise right in front of the midterms. You know, it could flip like this. This. This entire decision can get turned 360 in a year. But we shall see. I'd be curious to jump in. How does this, like, I feel like there's this trend of trying to punish people for things they've said like that. Like we're seeing now with the FCC investigating Kimmel. How do you feel about that?

[Commercial Announcer]

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[Tom Woods]

So investigating Kimmel is also stupid. This is one of those where, again, just an obscene amount of reasonable doubt that it could have been a joke about the age gap, which is what he says it is, which I'm totally fine with. Also, guys, please want comedians to point out the most, like, unsayable thing in the world. We should want that from them. And so, again, I don't think that what he's saying is an incitement to violence. Now, I certainly understand that when you aggregate all of the things that are being said, you've had three attempts on President Trump's life. So I think that that's a very real thing. And I think that the rhetoric that we see pouring out from all over the place is creating a real problem. Populist moments create a real problem. But if that is just a reality that we have to face from having social media accounts and everybody being able to say this stuff, and it just creates this background problem. Because, listen, you should be able to say, if you really think Trump is a Hitler like figure, you should be able to say that. Now, if the consequence of, you know, 10,000 people that have real voices online saying that this guy is like Hitler results in people making an attempt on his life, I still don't think that that means that you go and start arresting people for saying that. I think that that means that there is a cost to having freedom of speech. And I'm saying I'm willing to pay that cost. Now, the fact that we have drawn lines to say, if you go say he is Hitler, like, and you should go kill him. Yes. Now I get why. Or if you even say he's like Hitler, and I really hope that the next Churchill rises up and treats him the same way.

[Drew]

Cool.

[Tom Woods]

That's not nearly veiled enough for people to get away with. There are definitely lines. I trust the Supreme Court to draw those lines. But the FCC going after Kimmel is dumb. There was nothing in that joke that I think people should go after, because, man, you open that and people are just going to come after the comedians on your side. You don't want to be in the world of like, is that what he meant? Unless it is just blatantly obvious. Let it ride. That is freedom of speech. Freedom of speech has a cost and it is well worth paying.

[Drew]

And I'm sure that also extends to Britain and Miami and some of these other places where we've seen people tweeting things, having a social media opinion, and then getting arrested, getting thrown in prison and all these things. Again, not incitements of violence, but criticisms and critiques on institutions, people, certain countries, things like that.

[Tom Woods]

The UK is a joke. The UK is a joke. I don't know what they're thinking, that you guys are a parody of yourself. I cannot believe some of the people that you guys have locked up for the things that they've said. It is absolutely ridiculous. It is authoritarian rule. You're going to destroy your own country. And I weep because my wife is British. Some of the people that I love the most in the world live in England. And so the last thing I want to see is you guys becoming the very thing that George Orwell warned against your own son, trying to talk you guys off a ledge. And nonetheless, you're racing towards doing it. It really is you Guys look like buffoons. It is absolutely moronic. Immediately stop. That is just so stupid. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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[Drew]

There's certain ideas that are now gaining steam and I want to kind of attack those head on. Hasan went viral twice last week he had a interview with the New York Times. They platformed us. He introduced this concept called social, social murder. In a new New York Times interview, Hasan Piker says that many understand Luigi Mangione's killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson because Thompson himself was guilty of quote unquote, social murder.

[Tom Woods]

Engels wrote about the concept of social murder and Brian Thompson, as the UnitedHealthcare CEO was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the, the structural violence of poverty. Whenever you're arguing with somebody and you think that they're saying something that doesn't make sense, you want to drill into what is the base assumption because he's putting forward a worldview, a frame of reference that has a base assumption that health care is a right and that a insurance company therefore must exist and that any CEO running a company, despite all the personal risk that they take and all of that which I get, a non entrepreneur just has no idea for reasons that I hope are obvious. I feel very aggressively about that. And so it's like, yeah, mother, go build that company and now run it the way that I think is the right way. There was a poll done where people asked how profitable do you think companies are? And people estimated that companies are over 30% profitable. Do you know how crazy that is? People have just a ridiculous sense of like what it takes to run a company and how profitable these companies are and all this stuff. It's patently absurd. Also, insurance companies have to pay out like up to I think 80%. And so an insurance company cannot keep more than 20% no matter what. Like they have to pay out. And so he's putting forward an idea that is stupid on a whole lot of levels. And one of the levels on which it is stupid is that health care is a right now, I expect my own community to be up in arms in about 30 seconds when this gets to them, because I know a lot of them are going to think that this is right and maybe once the bots and AI are doing it for free. But when you're asking people to take incredible risk, invest massive amounts of capital. No. So all of that stuff is absurd. If you build a governmental structure that creates the infrastructure for business to thrive and make it impossible for them to build monopolies, you're in great shape. The bad news is we do the exact opposite and we create this environment where regulatory capture makes it next to impossible for innovation to happen. When you get these gigantic companies where it takes hundreds of millions or even tens of billions of dollars to build a competitor, and now functionally you have a monopoly, that's the thing that we've got to be super paranoid about. And when you've got somebody like Mark Cuban who's like, guys, the real problem is this whatever layer of the bureaucracy. Yeah. He's like, that is the problem. You guys are all worrying about some other thing. And he was like, what we really need to do is make sure that we can use innovation to drive the cost down. But I've got to put up with all this bull of the bureaucracy being able to stop somebody like me. And if you're a lesser entrepreneur than him, or you have lesser capital than him, which is basically everybody, then it's like, how the are you going to compete? That just isn't the shared understanding of what a capitalist is or capitalism is. And it's one of those capitalism is not like some clean angelic thing. It's a and messy knife fight of essentially guys trying to outdo each other effectively by any means necessary. Which is why you need some light touch regulation. They're not innovating only because they love and want to see good things. Myself included, by the way. I got wealthy and that was also a motivation. I was like, hey, if I can pull this off, A lot of money. Holy be incredible. You get to take advantage of the way that God, the matrix, whatever, constructed us such that you get this small cadre of people. It's largely male, it is not exclusively male, but they are hyper ambitious and they are very driven and they will burn the candle at both ends. I have knowingly shortened my life by enduring a level of stress that is not healthy. But bro, if today I came down with a disease where I'm like, well, I've got two weeks to live or whatever, I'd be like, I really gave it my all. Like, I really went after it, I would be very satisfied on my deathbed. So there are some people that like to play the game like that. You get to take advantage of that only when you create the system that allows people like that to really just go balls to the wall. And they will innovate and innovate and innovate and innovate to try and get you to give them your money. And they will drive cost down and they will make better products and they will make better products cheaper that help extend life, save people, all that. But they will also abuse the system. And one of the ways they abuse the system is regulatory capture where they go, okay, I did all of that. I'm now in this position. I did take incredible risk and did miraculous things to get here. But I don't like this feeling of vulnerability. I don't want the next guy who's going to outwork me. He's going to be younger than me, faster than me, sharper than me, more of the moment than me. I've got to block him out. And whether they know it consciously and are just heads or like we were talking about with the splc, it's just the subconscious motivation in the back of their mind they never fully acknowledge, but is there. They're going to block other people out. And we use the government to do it. And the great an irony is the people that are being abused by that system, meaning health care costs are going up. The reason that I say it could be free one day is in innovation. It's AI, it's robotics. If that really does like hit where they can capture essentially 100% of the energy from the sun. And like now energy is free. That means after the first wave of robots, everything is free, then sure to say that everybody should have equal access. Got it, love it. I'm here for it. But right now it's humans have to take huge risks, spend their life pouring themselves into a career. It's not owed to anybody. The, the for profit, paywalled system of, of health care in this country. And the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths. And that was a fascinating story from, for me, because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They're very black and white on this issue. And yet because of the pervasive pain that the private healthcare system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.

[Drew]

Hypothetically speaking. Right. Luigi Magione needed a surgery, couldn't get it cleared. His claim got approved. Two days, two weeks later, United CEO announced record profits, whatever like that. That's the typical news story that people are kind of regurgitating on. However, let's actually go through the layer as a company. Is there something we can actually do to hold health care companies accountable? Because there are. Whether it's 1%, whether it's what though my very next point, that there are certain, there is a certain percentage of. I'm going to deny this claim because it cost me too much money versus the Hippocratic oath. I have to help you whether or not I want to, whether I like you or not.

[Tom Woods]

Like that Hippocratic oath is first do no harm.

[Drew]

Okay, so then at that point there is no responsibility, social. We can't legislate it or otherwise for health care companies in order to try to keep the health of their populace.

[Tom Woods]

You, you certainly can legislate an attempt. But what we have found is that when you try to run something like health care through the government, it gets atrocious. And I know people like to bang the drum about other countries that have free health care. Do you see the lines for, for seeing your normal GP in Canada was absurd. So they begin throttling it because the, when something is free, obviously usage rates go up, up, up, up, up. This is one of those things where the free market has proven to be far more beneficial at creating these things than the government by, by orders of magnitude. I'll go back to the statement that I made before. If we want free healthcare, we can have it, but we've got to give something up to get it. So if Americans said, hey, we're going to balance the budget and our biggest expense is going to be healthcare, here are the things that we're going to do to means test it to make sure that this doesn't become parasitic, which it will. And so we're going to make sure that everybody has high quality health care. And we're going, we are going to realize there are trade offs. When you make it free, there are going to be big trade offs. And we're much happier with those trade offs than we are on the free market side.

[Commercial Announcer]

Cool.

[Tom Woods]

Like, like I said, even if I thought people were dumb to vote for it, I'm perfectly willing to accept what people decide to vote for. What I would appeal to people on is look at how the free markets work. Answer the question why China was in grinding poverty until they embraced the free market. You begin to understand the physics of how this stuff works, of how you actually get doctors to come in and do their thing. You begin to understand why when the system has the government backing it, that administrative costs balloons in, in the most egregious way possible, that we don't spend money on more doctors, we spend more money on administrators. There is a base assumption being made, and this is what I was trying to get to with the diatribe about Hassan, is that he has a base assumption in his worldview that people are obligated to work on behalf of other people. Now, each and every person listening right now would never do that. They themselves obviously believe they should have a choice about where they work and what they do. But all of a sudden, when it's healthcare, it's like, no, no, no, mother, get to work. That's just crazy. That's somebody not saying, oh yeah, this people, they're not slaves and so they can work where they want on what they want. They are not obligated. And so if Brian Thompson or anybody else wants to run a bad insurance company, they have the right to do that and they should go out of business if it's bad. And if the government is funding a bad company, guess what? We should be mad at the government. Don't fund companies like Trump is now talking about buying Spirit Airlines. Like, how stupid is that? That's so moronic. It's like companies are meant to go out of business. They're not doing the thing. So, yeah, you got to let it die. Get the government out of this. And even if we were going to make health care free, then what you do is you give people a stipend, just like I would want to see them do with education. You go, here's your budget. Everybody gets this amount of money and spend it how you see fit. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact theory after. Stay tuned. Discover top rated stays Loved by guests. Rated highest by real guests through authentic reviews. Verbo Book a vacation rental Loved by guests.

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[Tom Woods]

Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

[Drew]

Our favorite socialist, Zoro Mandani.

[Tom Woods]

Yeah, it is.

[Drew]

Who came out yesterday and had a press conference talking about there is a budget shortfall. He had a deadline to reveal New York City's budget and saying that this is a historic delay and they'll need more funding. Let's go right to him and get the scoop. New York City faces a budget crisis of a historic magnitude.

[Tom Woods]

True.

[Drew]

We inherited a deficit larger than any since the Great Recession. We cannot close this deficit with savings alone. We need new revenue and we need a structural reset in our relationship with the state. That is the only way to meet our legal obligations to pass a balanced budget and to do so without imposing a financial burden onto the backs of working people.

[Tom Woods]

I really hate this works. He speaks in a very professional manner. He's extremely good at that. He doesn't get emotional like he just, here's what we're doing. He. He really is a very talented politician, and I don't mean that like in a bad way. It is possible that there's something nefarious that lurks in the back of his mind. I'll reserve judgment for that. As I see him operate. My very specific frame of reference reads him as having something nefarious, but I try to keep that out of when I'm parsing the things that he does. He presents himself in a way that is fantastic. If he were putting forward policies that were awesome, I'd be like, oh, my God, this guy's amazing. He lies in a way that is. That feels so good that you rally behind him. It is a very distressing part of the human mind that if you lie in a way that's completely like, whoa, hold on a second. That, you know, don't worry, we're not going to be doing that. And I just want to walk you guys through exactly what we're doing. But your entire argument is predicated on a lie. It is not true that they can't close the budget gap, which I'm going to get into in detail in a second. He created the budget gap. Let's be very clear again, I'm going to walk you through the stats. He created the budget deficit and now he's asking people to accept that there's no way to close that budget deficit without more money. It's just. It is blatantly untrue. All he has to do is not spend more money. We'll get into the specifics, but the very quick thing is if he just went back to the 2025 budget, there's no shortfall. This is literally man made.

[Drew]

I thought Eric Adams had a $12 billion deficit.

[Tom Woods]

Eric Adams said, hey, all these things that we're doing, we're going to have this $12 million shortfall. But these you would still have. After all his maneuverings, you would still have. He's like 5 billion is where they're at now. And he has Prop 15 billion of new things when he came into office. So some of the things that they've done have reduced the gap, to be sure. But if he just weren't proposing the $15 billion in new expenditures, he would have already dug himself out of the hole.

[Drew]

So he has a surplus. But then he added more stuff and

[Tom Woods]

that brought him back into the correct. So what Eric Adams was pointing out is all these social systems, they are now creating this budget shortfall. He comes in momdani, reduces some of that shortfall and then adds so much more that he's now back in the negative. So if given the cuts that he's already made, went back to the 2025 budget, you would have no shortfall. The takeaway that I want people to understand there is whenever you have a mismatch on your ledger, there's always two options. Option number one is to make more money. Option number two is to spend less money. So anytime anybody tells you there's just nothing we can do, it is at just like the most factual level A L. So if he were saying, I don't want to do it, I'm not willing to make cuts. And so I am going to ask everybody to carry an extra burden. I wouldn't be able to say he's lying. I'd be able to say, I think these are foolish decisions. Here are my reasons why. But I wouldn't be able to say it's a lie. This is just a blatant lie. Now he's in good company. Politicians lie all the time. I just assume politicians lie for reasons that I think everybody will understand. Economic lies drive me the most crazy, especially when you've got somebody who's riding on the back of Socialism, which has a long, ultra documented history of just absolutely demolishing the working class, being the most sinister thing you could ever do to the working class. And so he's talking like, oh, I don't want to have to do this to the working class. It's like, the very economic structure that you're using preys on the working class. So, like, that's bull. So he either doesn't know the history of socialism or he doesn't care. And this is all political spin. Either way, it's maddening.

[Drew]

Well, it seems like we need the breakdown, though. There's only like eight seconds. I think he just asked for help from Albany, which is a state capital of New York State. I want to hear the budget breakdown.

[Tom Woods]

Here is my take. Mamdani is a master manipulator. You have to understand him in that vein, or he is always going to confuse you. He is manufacturing his own crisis. New York City does not need more money. They need to cut expenses. Mamdani's own team put forward a plan to balance the budget that would have required no additional money, and Mamdani rejected it the same day. So when he says that there's no way to balance the budget without additional funding, he is lying. Mamdani says the city has a budget crisis and that they cannot close this. This is a direct quote, cannot close this deficit with savings alone. He's asking Albany for a bailout and pushing to raise taxes on businesses, which nobody should be surprised by. And ultimately, taxes like this always end up going from businesses and the wealthy down to everybody, because that's where the actual money is. Now, the problem with his plan is because he created the budget gap in the first. Could make this problem go away simply by reducing it. But he's not presenting any of that. Mamdani's preliminary fiscal year 2027 budget proposes $127 billion in spending. That's roughly 15 billion above the previous year. It's a full 10 to 13% jump. Okay, so, Mom, Donnie himself, the things that he is proposing is somewhere between 10 and 13% higher than the already problematic budget that we had in the last year. So this is not me saying that Eric Adams was, like, doing a great job or that the people before him were doing a great job. They weren't. This has been going in the wrong direction for a really long time. But the answer is very simple. New York City's projected budget shortfall right now is 5.4 billion. Now, this is post. Some of the things that Mamdani has done so credit where credit is due. But the spending increase that Mamdani has put forward is nearly three times the remaining budget shortfall. So if he wants to balance the budget, all he has to do is hold spending flat at last year's level and the deficit disappears. Now additionally, New York is psychotically reckless with their spending. Long before Imam Donnie came on the scene, the entire state of Florida operates on a budget of about 116 billion. The state, Florida state, has nearly three times the number of residents of New York City. New York does not have a revenue problem when you are outspending the entire state of Florida. And by the way, it would be one thing if New York City just had more people, but you're outspending a state with three times your population. So the fact that Mamdani is lying and saying the only way to close the budget gap is more money, to me is absolutely grotesque. And the thing that I'm trying to get everybody rallied around, I do not care if you identify as Democrat or Republican. When people start talking about this, we have got to call a spade a spade. Remember the problem that we are all suffering from. The reason that people are going so hard to the left and the right, it's not the only reason, but it is the major foundational reason, is because the pie really is shrinking. And so when people can feel that they're unable to make ends meet, they go on a team because they need somebody to fight for them to make sure that they can take care of their basic needs. And right now, that is mathematically becoming harder and harder. The reason it's becoming mathematically harder and harder has a knowable cause. That noble cause is central Bankers and politicians have created a system where they can deficit spend and steal from everybody by inflating the currency, by money printing, by weakening the dollar. Now it helps them in a whole host of ways. It allows them to fraudulently spend, it allows them to fund wars. All the things that are driving people crazy on both sides of the aisle come down to that very simple thing. If you allow people to deficit spend, if you allow them to bamboozle you and say that, hey, there's just nothing we can do other than to generate more revenue, you continue to get this flywheel that makes it harder and harder on the working and middle class. You get the K shaped economy just going absolutely bananas, whether it's Trump, whether it's Mom, Donnie, it doesn't matter. Anybody saying that step one isn't to balance the budget is your fiscal enemy. I don't mean that you should be standing outside of their house or doing things at their White House correspondence dinner. I mean, that we need to be holding people to account for the cause and effect that exists in the economy. And so, yes, this is somebody who is on the exact opposite side of that that I'm going to rail on forever until they change that tune. Because otherwise we're all going to be driven mad arguing about the wrong thing. Now, for the record, on April 1, City Council Speaker Julie Menon. This is what I was talking about earlier. This is Mamdani's own democratic ally. She released a plan to close the entire roughly $6 billion gap up without raising taxes, without cutting services, or even raiding the reserves. The reason that Mamdani had rejected it was that he called it unrealistic. But why is it unrealistic? Menon's plan closed the gap mostly by re estimating costs that have been overstated and revenues that have been understated. The biggest single piece of her plan was an $860 million reduction by just simply removing the budgeted salaries for the vacant positions that the city has been unable or unwilling to fill. So just say, hey, those things that we were going to fill, cities running fine. We're not going to fill those positions. That's $860 million. The rest came from auditing and competitively bidding Department of Education contracts to the tune of about 175 million. Okay, these are the things that Mamdani is saying is are unrealistic. But this is one of the things that drives me crazy about unions. I get what people want. They want the unions to be a place that give more power economically to the people in the unions. But you can look at the stats and it doesn't end up working. It has like 2 to 3% impact on their pay. What has an impact is when you actually have a competitive market where the high skilled employees are able to go in and demand more from companies because the companies need them. Globalization made that effect effectively impossible. So we need to be looking with a sideways eye at these groups that are able to get bureaucratic dollars that don't end up making their way to the actual people. You can look at. Education is like the prime example. All of the additional expense, the reason that it's not yielding better results is that it's going to administrators and not better teachers. So looking at the exact kind of things she's laying out here is precisely what we should be doing. If we can capture additional revenue, the city, that the city is leaving on the table. This is her hypothesis from sources like the Department of Buildings, permit fees, Port Authority rent, debt service adjustments, tapping older tax liens through the city's graveyard trust, things like that. Then we can close the gap. So the fact that he rejected that out of hand on the same day and then isn't acknowledging that it's other things that he wants to do, to give for free or to make cheap that is causing the gap is absolutely maddening. This is how the taxes will precisely get pushed down to the average person. He's already talking about it. Forget it was like 47 days in was when he was like, sorry, homeowners, but you guys are going to have to cough up some more. We couldn't get the wealthy to do it. This kind of stuff is just crazy. Making When Mom Donnie tells reporters that there's no path to balance without new revenue, that is a choice. Oh, and by the way, to make matters worse, the Citizens Budget Commission projects that the budget gap is just going to keep growing and that it will hit roughly 10 billion within two years if spending isn't structurally reduced. So, yeah, buckle up, everybody. It's going to get weird before it gets better.

[Drew]

At least we have a politician who's talking about balancing the budget. You know, we got one.