Mamdani’s brilliant economic Rx: More government jobs

Bringing his socialist economic chops to fix New York City’s stagnant-to-sluggish jobs growth, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new solution is to hire more government employees.

His always-busy press office and Maoist “mass engagement” cadres announced Monday a new Jobs NYC Center, a “hub connecting New Yorkers to careers in public service.”

Citywide unemployment as of August was 4.8%, about a fifth higher than the national average of 4.1%.

Mamdani’s hate-the-rich, capitalism bad rhetoric hasn’t helped: Finance — which provides the tax revenue to fuel Gotham’s lavish social spending — has been reducing jobs in the city for long decades; these days job growth in financial services comes almost exclusively in lower-tax, business-friendly cities and states.

In the last year, the city added a measly 27,600 jobs to its private-sector workforce of 4.2 million — nearly all of them home-health aide work, which is mostly funded by Medicaid.

Meanwhile, city government’s headcount is at 308,000 fulltime jobs, down slightly from the pre-COVID de Blasio peak of 320,000 employees, but headed steadily up.

Indeed, Mamdani opened the new hub by swearing in 17 new city employees who were hired through the Center’s “soft launch” in August.

By the way, these numbers exclude positions not under the mayor’s hiring purview: If you count the MTA, NYC Health + Hospitals, CUNY and the like, the government workforce in NYC is closer to 570,000.

And lots more folks get paid by city-funded social-service agencies.

All these salaries depend on the taxpayers, yet Mamdani vows to “accelerate hiring across public service roles.”

Well, more government jobs do build voter support for his more-government agenda, plus public-employee-union dues that also support his coalition.

It’s effective politics, at least ’til the money runs out — but Mamdani-nomics sure seems dedicated to moving the city ever closer to that day.