Zohran Mamdani, the Queens assemblyman and mayoral candidate, has a plan for winning this month’s Democratic primary: He’s promising to give away lots of stuff.
Unfortunately for New Yorkers, his success would be extremely costly.
Officially, Mamdani claims he’s running “to lower the cost of living for working-class New Yorkers” — but his platform does nothing to make goods and services in the city less expensive.
Instead, he wants government to collect more taxes and pay for things itself, and to limit what others can charge for them.
Among many other pledges, Mamdani aims to “permanently eliminate the fare” on city buses and to make CUNY “tuition-free.”
These are the cheaper of his giveaways, each with sticker prices just shy of $1 billion.
Of course, nuking fares or tuition doesn’t mean decent service: Many cities that made buses free soon found that they became mobile homeless shelters — and more riders would push up the cost of services, too.
A Mayor Mamdani would have to spend more money than planned, provide less service than promised, or both.
This is basic economics — and Mamdani correctly recognizes that winning elections today hinges more than ever on convincing the electorate to ignore such constraints.
The cost of that ignorance will be massive, and not just because Mamdani’s proposed $9 billion tax hike — a steep jump that would inevitably fuel outmigration — isn’t nearly enough to cover his spending plans.
Worse yet is the extent to which Mamdani risks harming working-class New Yorkers as he attempts to reconfigure the city economy.
His bigger-ticket items — a freeze on rents and “free childcare for every New Yorker” up to age 5, provided at wages “at parity with public school teachers” — are so enormously extravagant that his campaign hasn’t even ballparked their totals or economic impacts.
Both would be guaranteed to cause major market distortions, with working New Yorkers as collateral damage.
Freezing rents on the city’s regulated units would do nothing to address the city’s fundamental housing problem: its supply shortage.
In fact, by discouraging existing tenants from leaving their sweetheart deals, it would make it harder for others to find a place to live.
Thousands of rent-stabilized units are currently sitting vacant because the law doesn’t let their owners raise rents enough to recoup the costs of improvements.
Freeze rents, and even more will follow — idled apartments that aren’t available to anyone, at any price.
And Mamdani’s freeze would bring poorer living conditions for rent-stabilized tenants.
Owners are already struggling to cover operating costs that rise far faster than allowable rents, so a freeze would immediately limit what they can spend on maintenance or improvements. More buildings would fall into disrepair sooner.
New York has seen this play out before. But by Mamdani’s analysis, the inevitable apartment bankruptcies and foreclosures aren’t a problem but a silver lining.
His platform calls for city government, already NYC’s biggest landlord, to take an even more active role in the housing market, spending $70 billion of taxpayer money on public housing over the next 10 years.
That’s a terrible idea — even leftist Public Advocate Jumaane Williams admits City Hall is “the worst overall landlord for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.”
Yet Mamdani’s rhetoric regarding child care deserves the most scrutiny.
Not only would it put the biggest dent on the city’s operating budget of all his proposals, it would cause tremendous distortion in other parts of the economy — even if his program fails.
Making child care “free,” and bumping up provider pay to the starting rate of a New York City schoolteacher (about $1,500 per week), would pit employers big and small against their city government.
Workers across the economy would expect unrealistic pay parity, with hospitals and other health-care firms taking the worst of it.
Regardless of how many families actually get free care — and it won’t be all of them — Mamdani’s plan is guaranteed to cause disruptions in the private child-care market along the way.
Then again, as in housing, reducing the role of private providers might be his socialist point.
His separate push for a $30-per-hour minimum wage wouldn’t help New Yorkers, either: Besides encouraging the underground economy, it would pressure employers to automate and outsource.
Those who want to put their foot on the economic ladder would find themselves out of luck — and on the public-assistance rolls.
Mamdani is brushing aside centuries of economic truth, asking voters to ignore mismatches between the city’s abilities and means and the havoc he would cause along the way.
His strategy — for the next four weeks, if not the next four years — was summarized neatly by New York’s own George Costanza.
“Jerry, just remember,” George assures Jerry Seinfeld in a memorable 1995 episode: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
Ken Girardin is a fellow of the Manhattan Institute.
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