Will Mamdani dump the worst budget mess since 2008 on our backs?

It’s time for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to level with New Yorkers.

It’s one thing, after all, for The Post to warn (as we have for months) that the city budget is majorly out of whack, so the rookie mayor will find it tough just to make ends meet, let alone find cash for his promised freebies.

But now even his fellow lefty, city Comptroller Mark Levine, is sounding alarms that the city’s staring at a $2.2 billion shortfall for the fiscal year that ends in less than six months.

And he projects next year’s nut to hit a jaw-dropping $10.4 billion.

Mamdani will have a “difficult” task in plugging the hole in the budget he rolls out in a few weeks, Levine says.

What an understatement.

True, unexpected revenues — e.g., taxes on higher-than-projected Wall Street bonuses — often roll in at the last minute and erase the red ink.

But Levine warns this “is the first time since the Great Recession that the City faces a budget shortfall of this magnitude this late in the fiscal year.”

Even if City Hall can close this year’s gap, it’s hard to see how it’ll close one almost five times bigger next year — certainly not without tax hikes (on the middle class as well as the rich), cuts to city services (police? firefighters?) or copious quantities of fairy dust.

So Mamdani needs to come clean: How on Earth will he pay for his free buses?

Free CUNY tuition?

City-run grocery stores (you just know they’ll run at a loss)?

He may get Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature to cover his tab for the new child-care services he promised, but that coverage will be limited, given Albany’s own fiscal woes.

And all the other goodies will lack sufficient funding, too.

We weren’t the only ones to suspect Mamdani would disappoint voters who counted on him to deliver on his pricey promises.

But with someone from his own camp, who serves as the city’s budget watchdog, now hinting as much, the mayor owes it to voters to tell the truth: Rather than expect goodies, New Yorkers best brace for major fiscal pain — of one kind or another.