People walk along Wall Street near the New York Stock Exchange July 13, 2007. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (UNITED STATES)/File Photo
(New York, NY) – Democrats and leftists in general in America have made “believe the science!” their mantra at least since the COVID crisis. The implied message being that THEY believe in science and medicine, etc. while those luddite Republicans disrespect science, rejecting everything from vaccines to the theory of evolution.
Psst… hey lefties, here’s a news flash: Mathematics is a science too! But Democrats have become more and more resistant to the basic rules of math for decades. This week in New York City, that math rejectionism was exposed once again.
Based on math disabilities created by the politics of resentment, the new Mamdani administration and the New York City Council learned that even the record high average bonuses doled out last month to Wall Street professionals were still well short of what those socialist and Democrat politicians expected.
To be specific, securities industry employees in the city received an average bonus of $246,900 for 2025, an increase of 6% from a year ago. That’s expected to generate about $199 million more in state income tax revenue and $91 million more in city revenue compared with a year earlier, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
But that wasn’t even half of the 15% increase the city’s budget projections were calling for in their tax revenue calculations.
There’s a scientific term for simply assuming that a more than double-the-record bonus haul is on the way. It’s called, “living in fantasyland.”
Of course, not all fantasylands are happy places. Socialists have long had an illusion that rich people have infinite amounts of money and every dollar they own is literally a buck that’s been taken from the pockets of the poor. This leads to overestimated assumptions about wealth and, worse, underestimations about how wealth can be increased without a corresponding increase in poverty.
This is just as bad as thinking that evil spirits spread cancer and 2 + 2 + 5.
It’s also not the first time that Democrats have ignored the basic science of math and economics. Probably the worst example of this is the steadfast belief among Democrats that wealth can be guaranteed in things like pensions, etc. Most of us want everyone to have a definite retirement nest egg they can totally rely on to the penny, but that’s not how math and economics work and there’s a long list of cities and private companies who have failed because the fantasy of guaranteed/defined benefits defies science too.
But this bonus miscalculation really takes the cake. It raises questions like: Did the city consult with the big brokerage firms before it came up with those outlandish bonus projections? Do any of the city employees or contractors who made those projections have Wall Street experience? Are we simply dealing with people with a religious fanatic level of socialist delusions?
Economic laws like the law of supply and demand are ignored every day by the non-believers who think health care and rental costs can be controlled by government price freezes or “free insurance.” Numbers and wealth can’t be changed any more than a few humans driving EVs can change the weather.
Remember, this mathematical and economic ignorance is entirely separate from resistance to fiscal responsibility. That’s just another problem that is only made worse by people who refuse to understand reality.
That reality turned out really great for Wall Street’s actual moneymakers, but not so well for the undeservedly superior and sanctimonious people who are sadly running this city.
–Jake Novak
