Hochul’s pied-à-terre-tax pivot shows Mamdani IS pulling her to the hard-left

Gov. Kathy Hochul is turning sharply to the left: On Tuesday, she announced a new “pied-à-terre tax,” flatly breaking her no-new-taxes vow; this follows her embrace of a public-employee-pension giveaway that could cost taxpayers $1.5 billion a year.

Far from “moderating” Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialism, she’s rushing his way.

The pied-à-terre tax will slap people who own second homes in the city worth more than $5 million with a tax surcharge; the gov guesses the take from 13,000 affected units will gin up $500 million a year for the city.

She says her goal is to help Mamdani close his multibillion-dollar budget gap — but her actual calculation is obvious: It’s a suck-up to up to socialist Mamdani and his far-left base, which wants to “tax the rich” just for sake of it.

So much for her repeated vows to oppose “raising taxes for the sake of raising taxes.”

She also plainly figures this will bring no blowback from voters, since — she assumes — most of those affected are “oligarchs” who live out of state.

Except that the tax would apply to any state resident who lives “primarily” outside the city but owns a high-end Gotham apartment.

Most of these high-end homeowners may well live out of state, but nobody really knows the numbers.

Equally important: Tax hikes never stop at “the rich” — it’s a divide-and-conquer game.

Consider the gov’s blather about how city residents shouldn’t “be left carrying the burden alone”: These properties are already taxed plenty; the owners of a Chelsea condo The Post spotted on the market for $5 million, for example, must already pay $84,000 a year in property taxes no matter where they live.

And if they’re primarily out-of-towners, they won’t even be using city services (schools, police, etc.) much.

And city residents — in every income group — will suffer: Hochul’s surcharge, about $38,000 on average, will erode property values across the board, as owners start dumping apartments on the market en masse, rather than pay the extra tax.

And when property values drop, so does property-tax revenue.

So the city’s take from the surcharge will fall short of promises: In 2021, the city’s Independent Budget Office estimated a similar pied-à-terre tax would raise not $500 million but $232 million.

Plus, even the $500 mill is a fraction of the cost of the pension giveaway Hochul also looks to be pushing.

The unions and their sock puppets in the Legislature aim to lower the age of pension eligibility from 62 to just 55, after 30 years of service, for employees hired after 2012 (Tier 6 employees), and slash their own required contributions toward their retirement funds.

A Hochul aide insists she won’t go for the full $1.5 billion the unions are demanding; she only seeks to “strike the right balance.”

Why isn’t zero the right balance? These workers have great benefits already, courtesy of the taxpayers.

Hochul was never a true moderate: Her $263 billion budget is 68% higher than the one 10 years ago, nearly twice the inflation rate.

And it includes a stunning 10% hike this year for Medicaid — a program that has soared 60% over her past four budgets.

Result: New Yorkers are the highest taxed residents of any state.

Pathetic: Hochul’s running for re-election vowing to make New York more “affordable” even as she’s ensuring that everyone will wind up paying more.