On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin reached a record $125.8 billion budget deal for fiscal 2027 that began the following day.

The mayor boasted: “Socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but . . . we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles.”

Spare us the propaganda, Mr. Mayor. The city budget isn’t in great shape.

Lest anyone be fooled, Mamdani’s supposedly balanced budget rests on a series of one-time tricks that got him through this year — and won’t be available in the next.

Remember back in January when he claimed he’d inherited a $12 billion deficit?

A prudent budgeter would have identified the lowest-value uses of money and trimmed accordingly.

Not Mamdani.

Despite robust tax receipts, he labeled his inability to grow government even more of a “fiscal emergency.”

He started demanding higher taxes on corporations and high earners from the state — which, thanks to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s caution, he didn’t get.

Now he claims he balanced the budget with the help of pension-contribution “savings,” but in truth, as Manhattan Institute’s Ken Girardin explained, he merely dodged today’s bill by dumping a bigger one on tomorrow’s taxpayers.

To avoid making $2 billion a year in pension contributions over his two possible terms, Mamdani is forcing his successor to absorb about $7 billion in unnecessary interest costs between 2033 and 2037.

What kind of financial whiz makes smaller credit-card payments today just to get killed on interest later?

Mamdani also re-estimated expenses lower and agreed to Albany’s delaying its school class-size mandate.

In the end, he and the council wound up spending 8.5% more than last year’s $116 billion budget.

Just between the mayor’s proposal in May and the final deal, fiscal 2027 spending grew by $1.4 billion on various agency programs.

Some “emergency.”

Meanwhile, City Comptroller Mark Levine’s latest report reveals the city’s mounting cash-flow issues.

During the first nine months of fiscal 2026, average cash balances declined by over $2.4 billion from the year-ago period.

Expenditure growth of 8% far outpaced receipt growth of 2.8%.

By failing to address this unsustainable structural imbalance, Mamdani will be back where he started come January.

By the mayor’s own estimate, he’ll face a $6.4 billion hole in the next fiscal year. Levine puts the figure at $8.8 billion.

Worse, private-sector jobs growth is stagnating — and next year, the one-time gimmicks won’t be available.

Yet the mayor will need to come up with even more money.

Municipal-employee contracts are expiring, so the unions will soon have their hands out for a good deal — and currently, the city’s labor reserve only has enough for paltry 1.25% raises.

To give workers more, Mamdani will need to raise additional cash, or demand productivity gains to make up the difference.

It’s easy to predict that he’ll run back to Albany to rattle the tin cup harder.

With Hochul free from the pressures of an election year, the mayor will almost certainly press her again to tax the rich and give him more funding.

The similarly ballooning state budget, however, is facing down an $18 billion structural imbalance between now and 2030, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

Despite adding $350 million to reserves in the budget deal, Mamdani might seek to raid the rainy-day fund again next year.

Even if he doesn’t, though, it’s woefully underfunded to weather a potential recession or even a revenue downturn.

Despite his general reluctance to trim headcount, Mamdani understands that not hiring new employees yields fiscal benefits — at least when it comes to cops.

In response to pressure from his radically anti-police democratic socialist base, Mamdani reversed plans to add 580 officers, overriding strong disagreement from Menin.

But both Mamdani and the City Council must internalize that budgetary health depends on controlling expenses.

As Nicole Gelinas pointed out last week, the council didn’t do fiscal responsibility any favors in its last-minute push to step on the gas for the unsustainable CityFHEPS housing-voucher program — which quadrupled from 2022 to 2025, to over $1.2 billion a year.

Mamdani pushed back on expanding it, because the program’s exploding costs threaten his other priorities.

He’ll need to resist harder next year, when the lack of one-time gimmicks forces him to make real trade-offs.

Ultimately, the mayor and speaker settled the dispute by creating a new housing-voucher program, which starts with $175 million in the just-started fiscal year and $125 million next year.

It won’t always be possible to paper over differences by agreeing to spend more, though.

Gotham’s bills are coming due soon — and no amount of socialist spin can change that math.

John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at Manhattan Institute.