July 28
Zohran Mamdani Loves Deregulation and Reducing Taxes
Eight licenses repealed, five fees cut, nine license terms extended, and a $5.4 billion budget gap closed without a property tax increase
Zohran Mamdani spent his first six months as mayor of New York City doing what his opponents say they want and swear he’d never do. On July 20 he announced more than fifty regulatory reforms covering the roughly 180,000 businesses in the city with 50 or fewer employees, which together employ about a million New Yorkers and account for a quarter of the private-sector workforce.
Restaurants will stop needing a second permit to serve ice cream.
Bodegas will stop needing a separate license to sell fruit and flowers on the sidewalk, which is a license they do not need to sell the same fruit and flowers indoors.
Two months before that, he released a $124.7 billion budget that closed the gap he inherited with no property tax increase and no new taxes on ordinary New Yorkers.
All of it is written down in an eleven-page policy summary and a signed executive order, and both documents are public.
Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for governor of New York, told Fox News viewers in May that if you own a single-family home, a two-family home, an apartment building, a co-op, a condo, a small business, a grocery store, or a bodega, Zohran Mamdani wants to take your property. The chyron under him read THE LEFT’S PLAN: CONTROL AND CONFISCATE. Laura Ingraham, on the same segment, said socialism to communism always leads to mass killing. House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain has called Mamdani a dangerous communist who will destroy the city.
Here is what the communist repealed.
The frozen dessert permit. A restaurant that already carries a general food service permit, the one covering the public health protections involved in serving food safely, needed a second permit before it could serve ice cream. Mobile and temporary food vendors needed it too. The Health Department will work with state government to end it.
The stoop line stand license. A bodega that wants to sell fruit, vegetables, soft drinks, flowers, confectionery, or ice cream from a display outside its own door needed this license, on top of whatever license covers selling the identical goods indoors.
The paper commissary agreement requirement. A mobile food vendor has to keep a physical copy of the agreement with the facility where the cart is stored and cleaned on the cart at all times. The Health Department already has the same document electronically. The penalty drops from $300 to $200 until the requirement itself is gone.
The outstanding-penalties barrier to a first food vendor permit. Vendors wait years on a list, and when their name finally came up, old unpaid fines for unpermitted vending kept them from receiving the permit.
The scrap metal processing license. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection concluded it serves no consumer protection function in the city, and will seek to exempt New York City from the state requirement.
Mayoral sign-off on sidewalk café applications, effective immediately, with the same step to go for roadway cafés once the outdoor dining legislation passes.
Prize caps and other rules on the bingo and games of chance licenses that nonprofit fundraisers hold, written back when the caps still described what a raffle prize was worth.
Three Taxi and Limousine Commission fines: for losing a license, for missing the annual drug test window, and for a late vehicle inspection. The commission charged the drug test fine to drivers whose licenses were already suspended, which means it charged them in the week they had no income. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance says the commission collects about $1 million a year from those fines.
Where the requirement stayed, the fee or the penalty came down.
Registration fees for commercial cooking equipment and food trucks at the Department of Environmental Protection, from $110 to $0 for twelve months.
The temporary food service establishment permit that street fair and event vendors buy, from $70 to $20.
Maximum penalties on three cross-contamination violations, from $600 to $500.
The replacement fee for a lost Taxi and Limousine Commission license, eliminated for up to three replacements over three years.
Two overlapping allergy poster requirements, one city and one state, collapsed into a single poster. An owner could be cited under both for the same wall.
Renewal cycles came up in the owner surveys as often as money did, because a renewal costs a morning away from the store.
Barber shop permits, annual to every three years. The city and state will also address the three separate permits a barber needs to operate: a state occupational license to cut hair, a state shop owner license, and a city shop permit.
Pawnbrokers, one year to two.
Ticket sellers, one year to two.
Scale dealer repairers, one year to two.
Newsstands, two years to four.
General second-hand dealers, two years to four.
Dealers in products for people with disabilities, two years to four.
Storage warehouses, two years to four.
Pedicab licenses, garage and parking lot licenses, and sightseeing bus licenses, each shifted to a longer cycle.
Executive Order 18 directs the agencies to treat owners differently, and it attaches dates.
Each business seeking to open is assigned one project manager through the Business Express Service Team, who stays with the owner across permitting, licensing, inspections, and compliance. Owners who can afford it currently hire private expediters to do this work.
An owner receives compliance education no more than 60 days before a pre-opening or periodic inspection, so they know what will be checked. The order specifies that the agencies won’t offer this education before a follow-up inspection or an inspection prompted by a complaint.
Beginning October 1, 2026, inspectors from eight agencies must hand the owner a physical copy of the Business Owner Bill of Rights at the start of every onsite inspection. A 2025 city survey of more than 500 owners found 9 percent had ever received it.
The inspector gives the owner a customer service survey when the inspection ends. Agency leadership reviews the results, and agencies must consider that feedback for inclusion in inspector performance evaluations.
By February 1, 2027, and annually after, eight agencies report how many inspectors completed customer service training and what share of the inspector workforce that represents.
A working group of fourteen offices and agencies meets quarterly on permit processing times, enforcement consistency, compliance rates, and hearing default and dismissal rates, then presents recommendations annually.
Third-party providers will offer the Food Protection Certificate course and exam, which until now required a trip to one city-run site on the Upper West Side. That site relocates to 125 Worth Street.
Dozens of additional food safety inspectors will be hired, so an owner who has corrected the problem behind a B or C grade can earn back an A instead of posting a letter for close to a year that no longer describes the kitchen.
Cure periods on three retail food violations, giving the owner a period to fix the problem rather than a summons. Child care providers get plain-language guidance covering the health, buildings, and fire departments together, an ombuds office, and an expanded permitting portal.
Now consider why the ice cream permit existed in the first place.
Article 4-A of the New York Agriculture and Markets Law declares its own purposes in its own text, and one of them is to insure “fair competition as between the manufacturers and distributors of the different products.” Sanitary standards appear in the same sentence. So does eliminating needless duplication of inspection, which is what the permit went on to produce. The same section forbids any municipality or county from setting a different frozen dessert standard, and that’s why the city can’t repeal this one alone.
The fee is $25 a year at most. The city retail permit expires every April 30 regardless of when the owner applied, so an owner who applies in March gets two months out of it, and an owner with unpaid fines can’t renew at all.
George Stigler argued in 1971, in “The Theory of Economic Regulation” in the Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, that regulation is, as a rule, “acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.” He won the Nobel in economics eleven years later, and business schools teach the idea as regulatory capture.
His own field has been arguing about it ever since. Sam Peltzman, writing for the fiftieth-anniversary symposium, splits the claim in two and finds the first half weaker: the rule that industry pressure produces regulation is, in his words, “honored mainly in the breach.” Cary Coglianese points out that Stigler never offered evidence for “as a rule,” and wrote elsewhere in the same paper that industry can’t get everything it wants. Capture explains some regulations and not all of them.
Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and Andrei Shleifer counted the procedures, the days, and the official cost a start-up has to absorb before it can operate legally in 85 countries, and published the results in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2002. Where entry regulation was heavier, corruption ran higher and the unofficial economy ran larger. Quality of public and private goods showed no corresponding improvement. The more democratic and more limited governments in the sample regulated entry more lightly.
Morris Kleiner and Evan Soltas put the average welfare loss from occupational licensing at 12 percent of occupational surplus, with workers absorbing 70 percent of it and consumers the other 30. Licensing raises wages and hours for the people who hold the license, and reduces how many people work in the occupation at all. Kleiner’s 2015 review of the field turned up little evidence that licensing many occupations improved the service consumers actually got, and a federal report that year reached the same conclusion. Between 1950 and 2013 the licensed share of the American workforce went from roughly 5 percent to roughly a quarter.
Michael Sances and Hye Young You worked through revenue data from more than 9,000 cities for their 2017 article in the Journal of Politics, and found that a city’s reliance on fines and court fees tracks the share of its residents who are Black, and that Black representation on the city council weakens that relationship. Nationally, fines, fees, and forfeitures come to under 1 percent of total state and local general revenue.
On taxes, the $124.7 billion executive budget he released in May closed a $5.4 billion two-year gap with no property tax increase and no new taxes on ordinary New Yorkers. He and the City Council adopted a $125.8 billion budget on June 30 on the same terms. Mamdani has described the shortfall he inherited as $12 billion, a larger figure covering more years, and the city and state comptrollers both attributed the size of it to underbudgeting by the previous administration.
New city revenue comes from two sources. State lawmakers passed a surcharge on non-primary residences on May 27, which took effect July 1 and expires in 2031. One-to-three-family homes owe it above a $5 million market value, at rates from 0.8 to 1.3 percent, and condominium and cooperative units fall under a lower threshold and higher rates for two years while the Department of Finance rebuilds how it values them. The city budgets $500 million a year from it. Comptroller Mark Levine’s office estimates something closer to $340 to $380 million. Notification letters went out to property owners on July 23.
The second source is a reduction in the personal income tax credit that unincorporated business tax filers claim, from 23 percent to 15 percent for filers with city taxable income between $142,000 and $1 million. City officials say they can make that change without state authorization. It applies to about 24,000 taxpayers and raises about $68 million.
The state Financial Control Board disagrees that the budget balances. Its staff projects a $1.8 billion gap in fiscal 2027 against the city’s stated zero, driven by uniformed services overtime it counts as underbudgeted by more than $710 million a year. The city’s own plan projects gaps of $7.1 billion, $9.1 billion, and $9.8 billion in the three years after that.
He also ran on shifting the property tax burden away from outer-borough homeowners, where Black and Latino owners in Jamaica and Brownsville pay effective rates that can run double what owners in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods pay on comparable value.
The February preliminary budget assumed a property tax increase of 9.5 percent across the board, generating $3.7 billion, as the alternative if the state legislature refused to raise income taxes on high earners. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards and Deputy Council Speaker Nantasha Williams both objected, on the grounds that a flat percentage run through a broken assessment system would raise bills for the same homeowners that system already overcharges. The state came through with aid and the second-home tax, and the May budget reversed the increase.
Two mayors before him announced versions of this. Bill de Blasio’s administration said in 2020 it had cut small business fines by over 40 percent since 2014 and would raise annual savings to $26 million. Eric Adams signed Small Business Forward in January 2022, announced reforms to 118 violations four months later, claimed $8.9 million in yearly savings, and called it the most successful such effort in city history.
This April, auditors working for Comptroller Mark Levine reported that Small Business Forward failed. Adams’ executive order never defined what a small business was. The agencies kept no data capable of measuring any effect. Most of the regulations targeted were rarely enforced to begin with, and of 116 recommended changes, seven addressed small businesses specifically. Nobody was designated to lead the effort and nobody set performance measures. The auditors couldn’t calculate the financial impact at all, and said so.
Mamdani’s order fixes part of that. Executive Order 18 names Small Business Services as the lead agency and sets a quarterly meeting requirement with annual reporting. It doesn’t define a small business, and neither did Executive Order 11 in January; the 50-employee threshold appears only in the policy summary, which carries no legal force. It also doesn’t require agencies to tag a violation or a permit as belonging to a small business, so the data needed to measure this package won’t exist either. Adams and de Blasio each published a savings figure. This administration hasn’t.
Both of Mamdani’s executive orders say, in their own preambles, that none of this is what closes these businesses. Executive Order 11 identifies high commercial rents, high insurance costs, and high fees charged by dominant marketplace middlemen. Executive Order 18 identifies commercial rent, insurance, utility bills, and abuses of market power by larger corporate actors, and gives Small Business Services until October 31 to deliver recommendations on all of it.
New York City lost about 5,100 businesses on net across 2025. In the fourth quarter of that year the Economic Development Corporation counted roughly 5,300 openings against about 4,900 closures, a net gain of 380 and the lowest quarterly closure count the corporation has recorded since the end of 2022. Those three months ended before Mamdani took office.
I wrote this article because the OPEN for Small Business package got covered as a socialist doing something unexpected, and it isn’t about socialism or capitalism or fiscal conservatism or any ism. Any Democrat who isn’t talking about getting rid of useless laws, permits, and statutes isn’t serious, because these are issues and they’re worth addressing. Mamdani listens to the people of New York City outside of ideology and tries to balance their needs against the budget and the public good.
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