Speaking of dumb ideas, New York’s liberal governor, Kathy Hochul, has joined Mayor Zohran Mamdani in calling for a tax on second homes in New York City valued at $5 million or more.

We’ve been trashing the plan from day one, and so we’re happy to see that even The New York Times wrote a scathing article about it, citing real estate agents and economists who “say the tax could be catastrophic for the city’s housing market, hurting not the superrich investors who park their money here, but the very middle- and lower-income citizens it’s designed to benefit.”

The Times reports that when a similar soak-the-rich property tax plan was tried in London, it didn’t go well: “The taxes have pushed housing values down and driven international buyers, who have historically made up nearly half of the homeowners in prime London neighborhoods, to consider other markets.” The result is that sales prices of London properties have fallen by more than 20 percent since 2015. And that steep drop has decimated London property tax collections.

Hochul and her ally, Mayor Mamdani, seem determined to drive away all of the high-income people in New York – and so far that plan is succeeding.