No wonder Zohran Mamdani demands the state raise taxes even higher to help him pay the bills in New York City. He has major expenses to contend with. These include a new propaganda bureau and chocolate flavored condoms.

The New York Post reports:

Taxpayers are on the hook for $5.2 million to pay the swollen salaries of the information ministers in socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new City Hall propaganda bureau – a staggering 175% more than first thought, The Post can reveal.

It’s barely been open for business for a month, but the Office of Mass Engagement has already seen its headcount balloon 186% from 14 to 40, with $5,123,756 earmarked for salaries, according to the city’s recently released 2027 executive budget.

Nothing grows as relentlessly as a government program.

Mamdani is planning to hire an additional 26 comrades by next year, at an average salary of $125,000, based on details in the budget. …

Workers in the Office of Mass Engagement come on top of the mayor’s own communications team, which is expected to be larger than that of any other mayor in Big Apple history, sources said.

At least chocolate condoms don’t cost as much as moonbat propagandists. Via Frontpage Magazine:

Gonorrhea rates in New York City have more than doubled in a decade and syphilis is ‘surging’ statewide. Mamdani’s Department of Health has responded to this crisis by rushing a free supply of lubricant and chocolate flavored condoms.

As with all things Democrat, Cultural Marxism comes into play:

Councilwoman Pierina Sanchez, a Mamdani ally, explained that the free chocolate flavored condoms were necessary because “inequities persist among women, low-income households, and Black and Latino New Yorkers.”

Sorry white male New Yorkers who work instead of vote for a living. No chocolate condoms for you.

Gonorrhea and syphilis are not the only diseases that unsurprisingly are on the rise in a city run by moonbats:

After a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak in city buildings in Harlem killed 5 people last year, several residents in Manhattan public housing came down with the disease this year. Residents in public housing were told to stop taking showers and fill up bathtubs very slowly as they try to figure out what’s causing it.

Health officials hadn’t gotten around to issuing this warning until the second person came down with the disease, but that’s a step up from last year when the source of the outbreak turned out to be the site of the New York City Public Health Laboratory: a ‘state of the art’ $454 million glass and steel tower whose bureaucrats would be “tasked with protecting and promoting the health of all New Yorkers and keeping the city at the forefront of disease response and investigation” which instead infected around 100 people with a disease.

Half a $billion for yet another building full of largely useless overpaid bureaucrats. Good thing money is free when it belongs to someone else.

On tips from Wiggins and Franco.