It’s almost amusing to see the comments coming out of (some) Wall Street folks and billionaires after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Primary for mayor.
“Wall Street panics over prospect of a socialist running New York City,” a Wall Street Journal headline reads. “It’s officially hot commie summer,’ Dan Loeb, chief executive of hedge fund Third Point, and a major Cuomo backer, wrote on X.”
Garry Tan flew into a panic about Mamdani’s popularity. Leading Trump and Cuomo donor Bill Ackman is offering a multi-million dollar donation to any challenger who can beat Mamdani’s “avowed socialism.” Fox News had its own apoplectic and hilarious reaction (baby baskets for newborns! The horror.):
The reality is that a lot of wealthy New Yorkers voted for Mamdani, and most of them aren’t going to flee the city, and what he is proposing is not all that radical at all.
The New York Times had to try, awkwardly, to explain what a Democratic Socialist is:
an ideology rooted in its opposition to capitalism and wanting to shift power to workers from corporations.
That’s part of it, but the larger part, in today’s context, is a belief that economic inequality is deeply damaging to society, and that the solution is higher taxes on the rich.
Mamdani isn’t even asking for that much from the rich. His platform calls for raising the corporate tax rate from 9 percent to 11.5 percent, and adding a 2 percent income tax on people earning more than $1 million. That, he argues, will bring in enough for free child care and free bus service.
He’s also asking for a freeze on rent in all rent-controlled buildings.
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The tax rate across the river in New Jersey on corporate profits of more than $50 million is already 11.5 percent, and nobody is calling that state a commie haven. And every single person who would pay the 2 percent income tax hike will save more than that, far more than that, from the Trump tax cuts. (They can also deduct some of that 2 percent from their federal income taxes.)
This type of tax policy was entirely in the mainstream of the Democratic Party from the New Deal Era until the late 1970s. If Eisenhower and Nixon were commies, it’s news to me.
The current allowable rent increase in New York City is 2.75 percent a year. Lowering that to zero for a while won’t bankrupt landlords.
From the UK Guardian, which actually has some perspective here:
Mamdani’s platform, which couples a supply-side focused “abundance agenda” with demands for equitable redistribution and expansive public-sector investment, offers precisely the kind of social-democratic governance model New York desperately needs. There’s nothing fundamentally radical about these demands; rather, what’s genuinely radical is the excitement they have inspired among voters, including many who previously disengaged from local politics altogether.
That’s about right. Some Wall Street folks are all clutching their pearls, but the people in New York have said that they are sick of the Democratic Party Old Guard, that they want change and new ideas, and that taxing the very rich to provide services like transportation and child care is just common sense.
The party establishment, which tried hard to get disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo elected, now has a choice: Raise millions to try to defeat one of the few politicians who has excited the Democratic base at a time when the party is widely unpopular—or wake up and get a clue.
