I just pulled up a summary of his policies (in bold below) and there is nothing that I disagree with. If that makes me a Marxist, so be it. I like people who try to help lower-income earners instead of billionaires.
As an aside, most of his policies are viewed as only a bit left of centre in Canada or Western Europe as subsidized daycare, reproductive freedom, strong labour rights protection, universal healthcare, etc., are all well-established outside of the US.
"His platform includes opposition to wealth inequality, racism, and discrimination, support for LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, immigrant protections, and single-payer healthcare, community-based approaches to public safety, universal childcare, fare-free public transit; large-scale social housing, expanded labor protections, higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners, and climate policies linking decarbonization to social equity."
Mamdani inherited a $12 billion / year deficit, and has a balanced budget for this year without increasing taxes (albeit partly b/c of $4 billion from the state so arguably still a $4 billion deficit). He has done this partly by cracking down on overtime abuse by city employees and other inefficiencies. He’s also enforcing parking and zoning laws against people and companies who are serial offenders, making them actually comply with the laws and improve things. The horrors.
So, is this an actual, thoughtful balanced budget that considers significant moves on both the revenue and the expense sides? Or is it mainly the usual temporary accounting gimmicks that kick the can down the road for personal gain today, along with a big ol pile of state aid that also isn’t guaranteed in the future?
Some of it is political BS can kicking and revenues above projected. But some is real work on the expenses side, albeit largely driven by fixing low hanging fruit coming from replacing a series of corrupt mayors.
The proposed budget for next year has some tax increases to work on the gap with the state funding. I don’t live in NYC, but hear from people who do that overdue infrastructure work is actually happening. At the local level, I think basic competence is more important than ideology and he seems to be getting stuff done and making things better.
I remember when Bush said that if he lived in Louisiana, that he would vote for the Democrat over David Duke for governor b/c basic moral standards.
Last week Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Railroad Commission of Texas, sent out a bizarre fundraising email. Framed as a reminder of the 108th anniversary of the Communist overthrow of Russia, the email included an AI-generated image of his Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, smiling in the chambers where the country’s then-ruling Romanov family was executed in 1918. Rosenthal, French’s campaign continued, has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed” the Romanovs, and has plans for his own “infernal revolution” of Texas. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam,” the email continued.
This week, in response to a video that purported to show nonwhite people trespassing in a restricted part of Yellowstone National Park, French posted a quote from “The Camp of the Saints”—an obscure French dystopian novel that depicts immigrants as diseased, feces-eating hordes and has enjoyed a recent resurgence among the global white nationalist movement. “Your universe has no meaning to them,” French wrote on X to his 80,000 followers, without revealing the source of the quote. “They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door . . .”
Citing fears of “gay race communism,” an impending “massacre of heritage Americans,” and the nation ending up like modern South Africa, French has called for the United States to “be Rhodesia,” the African pseudostate in the sixties and seventies in which Black people were violently oppressed by a ruling white minority. Rhodesia has inspired numerous racist killers—most infamously Dylann Roof, the self-described “Last Rhodesian” who massacred nine Black congregants at a South Carolina church in 2015.
“We are all Rhodesians now,” French wrote in January.
