Michael Goodwin: Hochul is running scared from the pied-à-terre tax —but her prints are all over the proposed disaster

You can follow politics for decades and never see an elected official run away from a problem faster than Gov. Hochul did Monday.

After a Staten Island judge halted the city’s muddled implementation of the unpopular pied-à-terre tax, the governor ducked any responsibility despite proposing the tax and pushing it through the Legislature.

On Monday, that history seemed like the work of a governor from another planet when Hochul shifted into the role of an innocent bystander so smoothly that it looked rehearsed.

At an appearance after the court ruling, she began by making an inane observation of the obvious, saying people are “frustrated with the rollout” of the tax but quickly shifted into “don’t blame me” mode.

“We are not responsible for the rollout,” she said shamefully.

“This is something that we talked to the city about in advance.”

Trying to wash her hands of the disaster won’t fly given how she boasted about proposing the tax and defending it as fair and necessary.

President Trump certainly wasn’t fooled by her sudden claim of innocence.

He blasted the tax in a Truth Social post as “pure Amateur Hour” that will “RUIN” the city and vowed to have the federal government look into the tax ­before it takes effect.

He called the levy a dangerous “experiment” that will destroy the city and state, saying “it is hard, as President of the United States of America, to sit back and watch it happen, especially to a place I once loved.”

Campaign pandering

The history of how we got to this strange moment cannot be separated from the ways Hochul’s re-election campaign aims to appeal to Mamdani’s legions of radical leftists.

Higher taxes, especially on the wealthy, are foundational to the raging socialist mindset, and ­Hochul, while pretending to be a moderate, gave the mob what it wanted.

Although she rejected Mamdani’s bid to raise income taxes on the wealthy and successful corporations, she offered the pied-à-terre tax as a substitute that would yield about $500 million a year.

When she proposed it, her press release included praise from Mamdani that implicated her in his class-warfare regime.

“Thanks to the support of Gov. Hochul, we are one step closer to balancing our budget by taxing the ultra-wealthy and global elites with a pied-à-terre tax — the first of its kind in our state,” he boasted.

Roping her in even closer, the mayor said he and Hochul were “fighting every day to make sure the wealthy contribute what they owe and our budget reflects our commitment to the working New Yorkers being priced out of our city.”

On the day it passed, he rushed to a Central Park South building in Manhattan to taunt billionaire Ken Griffin, with a weird video where the mayor boasted about “taxing the rich.”

Hochul offered no criticism, instead confining herself to a misleading reference to the tax as being about “accommodations in the short-term transition phase for the ways in which different property types are currently ­valued in New York City.”

But there was something else in the law that she wasn’t talking about.

In a little noticed-statement last week, a Hochul aide ­revealed that the state is using the city’s list of properties that could be subject to the surcharge to find evidence of fraud against the state.

Eye on ‘nonresidents’

According to a report in Goth­amist, the state is looking for homeowners “falsely claiming to be a nonresident” in order to cheat on state taxes.

In effect, Albany is using the pied-à-terre roll as a dragnet to compel homeowners either to pay that tax or claim New York residency.

The latter would prevent them from benefitting from lower income tax rates in other states where they own property, such as Florida.

In a statement, the official, identified by Gothamist as Jen Goodman, also raised the possibility that the new law could lead to “steep penalties against homeowners who live in New York City” for more than half the year, but instead pay income taxes to lower-tax states. Clues could include an out-of-state driver’s license, cars registered elsewhere and out-of-state license plates.

Hochul, to my knowledge, has not mentioned those plans to use the city’s list of properties to snoop for state tax purposes.

Her ultimate aim is to attract Mamdani voters while not driving middle-class and higher-income families into the arms of her GOP gubernatorial opponent, Bruce Blakeman.

Blakeman vows to eliminate the pied-à-terre tax and roll back state spending, but is struggling to mount a real threat against her.

Republicans have not won a statewide election since 2002, and most polls show Blakeman trailing by double digits.

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2-to-1 in the state, and there are more non-affiliated voters than Republicans.

For Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, to have a reasonable chance of winning, he’ll need to get more than 30% of the vote in the five boroughs.

That’s the recent high of GOP candidates, including gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin four years ago and Trump in his 2024 re-election, both of whom lost the state.