Communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made discount public grocery stores a centerpiece of his campaign to get naïve New Yorkers to vote for him. Apparently, it worked.
Now he has to pony up.
He now claims that they will be implemented in 2029 and provide groceries at a 30% discount from those sold in private stores.
This is simply going to be impossible to deliver without these groceries being subsidized by taxpayers. That means you and I and every other taxpayer will subsidize those lucky enough to be first on line in those few public supermarkets.
The stock will be reduced almost immediately and only the few will receive the benefit, while the rest of us will foot the bill.
The savings for even those people will be short-lived, because the private bodegas in the area — usually owned by minority neighbors — will soon go out of business because they can’t compete with government-subsidized competition.
Ultimately, that’s what the communists want: Put the private folks out of business and then develop a government monopoly over the means of production. You can go back to the Soviet Union in the 1980s to find out how that worked out. Or Cuba and Venezuela today.
Mamdani’s second-home tax impacts far more people than he advertised.
The communist mayor also announced that he will be taxing individuals who live outside New York City, but own a home within the five boroughs if it is over a certain value. In his mischievous press event outside the home of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, he made it appear that it was only the billionaire fat cats who would be affected.
Back then, he said it would be limited to anyone with a home valued over $5 million. But he forgot to mention at the time that the wording of the bill also included co-ops and condos with values over a mere $1 million.
That encompasses far more people, many of whom would be considered just in the middle or upper-middle classes, not the super-rich. Up to 17,000 people received the notice of a pending tax increase.
So, as is typical with communists, first they say they’re only going after the billionaires, but eventually it comes after all of us.