Standing in City Hall this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani solemnly looked into the cameras and asked, “What kind of mayor keeps a $5.6 billion budget deficit secret for years?”

The new mayor accused his predecessor, Eric Adams of using “sleight of hand” accounting tricks to hide New York’s dire budget hole.

Nice line.

Not true.

Here’s the reality: The city’s budget gap isn’t some newly unearthed conspiracy.

It’s been publicly projected and debated for years in financial plans, comptroller briefings and news cycles.

The only “secret” here is the one Mamdani needed to pretend he’d discovered, because he ran for mayor on a wish list that costs real money in a city that doesn’t have it.

So he did what he always does — blamed scapegoats in a performance he thinks will play well on TikTok.

First he dumped on Adams, then on former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who hasn’t been in office since 2021.

Why?

Because when you don’t have solutions, you need a boogeyman.

Mamdani even came with a shiny new talking point, claiming that the city is being “shortchanged” in Albany by contributing 54.5% of state revenue, yet receiving only 40.5% back.

It exposed why adults don’t build fiscal policy around cherry-picked stats.

The report Mamdani cites calculates “New York City’s contribution” based on where people work, counting income earned in Manhattan by commuters who live outside the five boroughs.

Measure revenues by where taxpayers actually live, and the gap shrinks dramatically: 46.7% of state revenue comes from city residents; 41.3% of spending goes back to them.

In other words, the mayor is waving around a number that double-counts the city’s economic gravity to justify tax hikes that could drive more jobs, and taxpayers, out.

And that’s before you add the part Mamdani forgets: For decades, Albany has taken on costs that would otherwise crush the city, from CUNY’s four-year colleges to major subway funding to health care.

Under Cuomo-era reforms, for example, New York capped growth in local Medicaid costs and effectively shifted that spending to the state — a huge pressure release on local budgets that saved New York City $28.3 billion over the last 10 years.

It’s not to say that Albany is perfect, but that Mamdani’s cartoon version of “the city versus the state” is a child’s rendering.

And the irony is rich: As an assemblyman under Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mamdani and his comrades supported unfunded mandates that are blowing holes in the city’s bottom line — like the class-size mandate — and never pushed the state to shoulder a 50-50 split of costs during the migrant crisis.

Yet somehow, he wants us to believe he’s the victim of someone else’s irresponsibility.

This isn’t about honesty, but about raw politics.

Mamdani is building an excuse for his real goal: hiking taxes on the wealthy and on businesses.

His universal-day-care sham gives the game away.

Mamdani ran on the promise of universal child care starting at 6 weeks and raising taxes to pay for it, selling voters the idea that ideology-driven tax hikes were the price of “free.”

Hochul, hoping to avoid that election-year tax disaster, tried to preempt the problem by rolling out 2-Care, expanding the city’s 3-K program to 2-year-olds.

But look at the fine print — Hochul’s plan doesn’t remotely match Mamdani’s campaign promise.

It merely funds what amounts to a pilot, with a first phase serving just 2,000 2-year-olds — in a state with over 222,000 of them.

So no, this isn’t “universal child care.” It’s a limited rollout dressed up to satisfy activists and pad a press release.

And it took a weapon out of Mamdani’s hands.

His aim was to use child care as a political battering ram to justify higher taxes — the same ideological playbook Bill de Blasio tried to run when he demanded “tax the rich” to fund pre-K.

With child care declared “mission accomplished,” Mamdani needed a new excuse to push for new taxes.

Hence this week’s performance.

That’s the Mamdani governing model: theatrics first, math never.

He’s not the first new executive to confront a problem like this.

In January 2011, Cuomo inherited a projected $10 billion budget gap.

Instead of whining at a podium, he closed the hole without new taxes — largely through spending restraint, a Medicaid redesign and structural reforms that flattened the cost curve. 

In other words, dealing with the deficit the hard way, by making tough choices.

New Yorkers deserve better than a mayor who treats the budget like an improv exercise, feigning shock at numbers everyone has been staring at for years, blaming everyone but himself while he reaches for the only tool he’s ever had — someone else’s wallet.

If Zohran actually wants to lead, here’s a suggestion: Stop performing and start governing.

Melissa DeRosa is a Democratic strategist and former top aide to Gov. Cuomo.