TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Want to know how a socialist mayor would govern New York City? Ask Chicago.
A major city. A heated mayoral election. A familiar dilemma: a moderate, business-friendly Democrat versus a democratic socialist. New Yorkers, take it from Chicago — we’ve seen this movie before, and the ending isn’t pretty.
New Yorkers will cast their ballots Tuesday in New York’s mayoral primary, where 11 candidates are vying to win the Democratic primary in America’s largest city. Frontrunner and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in a tight race against New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani wants to freeze rents, open city-owned grocery stores, provide bus service for “free,” tax corporations and the 1%, and increase the minimum wage to $30, among other left-wing positions that differ greatly from Cuomo. Most of Mamdani’s ideas are shared (at least in principle) by Mayor Brandon Johnson, and many of them are popular in blue cities. But experience has taught us here that far-left candidates do not make for effective or popular municipal executives in today’s stressful economy.
Johnson tried to float a $300 million tax hike — and failed. He tried to pass a “mansion tax” that would’ve hiked the real estate transfer tax — and failed. He’s built too few affordable housing units for too much money. He’s isolated himself from many of the state and federal officials he hopes will come to his financial rescue, and he’s done egregious special favors for the people who got him elected — namely, pushing an incredibly costly new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union. He forced out a highly competent schools chief who wouldn’t cow to his desire to borrow recklessly. His city is broke, but he wants to spend more. The list goes on.
Johnson’s approval rating cratered in his second year — a reflection of how quickly progressive promises collapsed under the weight of governance and Chicago’s financial reality. What sounded good in theory has translated into dysfunction, driven by fiscal missteps and political inexperience.
Johnson is one of the most progressive mayors in the U.S., but Mamdani, inarguably, is yet more radical.
America’s Governor is also going twenty minutes into the future:
UPDATE: NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is poster child for ‘luxury beliefs.’
a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.
As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.
But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.
Take, for example, Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents. Without raising rents, many landlords cannot afford to maintain their buildings, which leads to apartments becoming rundown or empty. This is one reason why, ironically, cities with rent control policies have the lowest levels of affordable housing — a policy that hurts working-class families most.
Then there’s Mamdani’s push for free public buses, a plan that would cost $630 million a year. An analysis by the Transportation Research Board found that “some public transit systems that have experimented with or implemented a fare-free policy have been overwhelmed … by the presence of disruptive passengers, including loud teenagers and vagrants.” This, too, would make life harder for low-income New Yorkers who depend on public transit every day.
Mamdani has also been a supporter of the “defund the police” movement. But a recent poll from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that a majority (54 per cent) of New York City voters say they want to see more police officers across New York. Only 17 per cent say they want to see fewer, while 21 per cent say they want to keep the existing number as it is. Meanwhile, the poorest Americans — those who earn $25,000 or less a year — are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
As Kevin Williamson warned a decade ago, “the thing about [Mike] Bloomberg is, he’s a busy body and a nanny and self-regarding and sanctimonious and unbearable, and Jesus, are we going to miss him when he’s gone, because Bloomberg, for all of this faults and his weird little psychosis about bacon and salt and soft drinks and sugar and all the rest of it, and smoking, especially, basically kept what was best about the Giuliani administration.”
Gooder and harder, Fun City.
UPDATE (10:30 PM):
