Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
I’m no political wonk, and I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices.
I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message but he was mostly stymied on policy goals. Specifically Obamacare as an example ended up being watered down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_19...
(Fuck you Bill Kristol.)
There's a long, sad, littered history of attempts at universal care in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_...
https://www.cmcforum.com/post/bill-kristol-says-he-would-vot...
You can hear him discussing it here:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bill-kristol-fake-news-on-60-mi...
I'm also reminded of the time Jon Stewart got Bill Kristol to admit that a government-run health care system (the VA) was good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor...
Zohran can easily fund which is why every single GOP Senator and Congresman went publicly against him. Can’t have people get any crazy ideas that they could actually have nice things. WTF does Congresman from a some shithole county in Alabama give a fuck about who Mayor of NYC is? but GOP is a well-oiled machine so it was all-hands-on-deck to prevent these ideas from infecting the nation…
even though this seems like a victory, starting in about 10 minutes the entire GOP message for 2026 is going to be “Zohran is Democratic Party now” and it just might work
Dog whistles are supposed to be subtle.
It was a compromise law that was in alignment with Bush era mainstream conservatives. The fatal flaw of Obama and Biden is they underestimated the power of the nutcase wing of the Republican Party. (Along with the institutional GOP folks)
the sad thing is, history will remember him as first black President and that’s really about it. and most of us cried watching that speech from lincoln park.
our current president is causing most of us to cry daily but will be remembered as one of the most influential presidents in the history of this country… sad, very sad, but all true
Maybe, if Obama had been as ruthless as Trump and used blatant lies and targeted attacks on senators to make them so fearful of re-election that they would play along, he might have gotten it passed, though probably not even then. Plus, as much as I wish we'd had the original Obamacare, I'd rather have a watered down version with balance of powers, than a tyrannical president who cowers the legislative branch into submission.
This statement alone is the craziest thing about our country (I don't disagree...). However, if you make something a centerpiece of your entire political life and then you do not deliver you have effectively failed. I am sure if Obama had a do-over he would either get this done right or punt and focus his tenure on something he could have actually delivered...
I hope the same doesn't happen with Zohran. If he was going to fail after all, I wish that will at least be after he had fought as hard as he can.
ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
For your resume, sure.
Sometimes reform only works when you fully commit and if half the country isn't on board, it's not better to pass some mutilated and watered down version.
No, for everyone. Some voters like politicians who pass zero legislation while holding firm to their values. Occasionally they get rewarded. Most often, they’re branded–correctly–ineffective. (And, I’d argue, unfit to lead. If you’re using millions of Americans as human shields to pass an ideologically-pure package, that’s immoral and belongs with Twitter celebrities, not leaders.)
You're arguing that it's good for a politician's resume.
Just not having that legislation, letting employment & insurance decouple and a sane market for healthcare develop might easily be better than the ACA.
Maybe? But what is the mechanism by which employment gets decoupled from health insurance? That would require a different law, I suppose?
But that wasn't what I suggested: I said having the ACA is better than not having it, not that having the ACA is better than other possible alternative laws. I can think of quite a lot of alternative healthcare reform laws that would be significantly better than the ACA.
And I think it's reasonably safe to say that in "ACA vs. nothing else", ACA wins, if we judge by the millions of people who will lose healthcare coverage if the ACA were to be repealed and not replaced with anything new.
It seems to be the only way to interpret what you suggested. How could it end up in a situation where there aren't other alternative laws? There are automatically laws governing what people do - laws exist. The conversation is entirely about which laws are best. In this case, I'm arguing that generic rules (not specifically tailored to healthcare) are probably better, since a generic market seems to outperforms the US healthcare system.
> And I think it's reasonably safe to say that in "ACA vs. nothing else", ACA wins
Well I can't control what you think but I can point out that it is a hard stance to provide evidence for. Healthcare is fundamentally less important than really urgent and essential services like food production or utilities and they manage to get great coverage with relatively limited fuss. The reports I've heard are that people find the situation in healthcare to be quite substandard.
Unregulated market is an oxymoron. It’s always regulated by someone, warlords being the extreme devolution.
For a medical emergency it does make sense for a doctor to ask if you would like to voluntarily consider an interesting bargain.
And I'd still rather have a private option in the event of a medical emergency. Ironically, insurance in a free market is actually really good at sorting out that sort of risk. The insurance company has strong incentives to negotiate what will happen in an emergency and it isn't that hard to make agreements with people in advance.
I do, however, think the passage and defense of the ACA has completely stopped any kind of healthcare reform movements from Democrats and completely turned Republicans against the idea.
[0] To be fair, it did go further than previous GOP proposals. They did include individual/employer mandates and a marketplace, but not stuff like the Medicaid expansion and higher taxes on high earners to help pay for it.
Maybe I wasn't clear. Let me try again. Many of the policies behind the ACA had long been championed by Republicans, or even originated in conservative circles. For example:
1. The individual mandate was something the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) originally came up with back in the 80s, and was presented as an alternative to Clinton's healthcare plans in the 90s.
2. The state-based exchange system was something already present in some red states like Utah, and the concept is very similar to Republican proposals (again) back in the 90s. (This shouldn't be surprising: conservatives tend to prefer that states administer programs like these. Not a criticism; just noting a tendency.)
3. Much of the ACA's framework is similar to Republican Governor Mitt Romney's healthcare reform in Massachusetts from 2006.
Sure, there are parts of the ACA that Republicans genuinely didn't support (e.g. Medicaid expansion, high-income-earner tax increases, requiring insurers to cover contraception). But big, fundamental parts of it were similar to or exactly like conservative healthcare reform plans that had been proposed over the past couple decades.
The only reason I can see to explain why Republicans so vehemently fought and voted against the ACA (and have subsequently repeatedly tried -- and failed -- to repeal it) is because they didn't want Democrats to get credit for enacting it, and once it became "blue policy", it was automatically capital-B Bad to them.
It's also telling that Republicans have failed so miserably at repealing it (though they have done it damage). That's because they have no alternative... because the ACA is more or less what they wanted in the first place.
[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2...
Actually come to think of it a very similar pole reversal happened in Canada with the "Trudeau/Liberal Carbon Tax" -- a program originally proposed by the British Columbia Conservative Party, first implemented in Alberta by a Conservative Party and proposed federally by Stephen Harper of the Federal Conservatives.
While Romney has said a lot of mixed stuff over the years about the ACA, starting with pledging to repeal it during his 2012 presidential campaign, his more recent rhetoric has softened by orders of magnitude, voting against some of the repeal efforts, voting in favor of some modifications, expressing the need for a replacement plan before repealing it, and acknowledging that repealing it would cause millions of people to lose coverage. I don't agree with his position overall, but I think he's been a fairly "reasonable Republican" about it, including his belief that this sort of legislation belongs at the state level and not the federal level.
But there are plenty of Republicans in the House and Senate (more in the House, I suppose) that just seem rabidly, irrationally anti-ACA. Even while chanting "repeal and replace", they seem to forget the "replace" part of it.
Republican voters seem irrational as well: while opposition to it has softened since the Obama years, it's still pretty high (~70% or so), but you get weird effects. Like if you refer to it as "the ACA" instead of "Obamacare", Republicans don't hate it as much. Or if you don't mention "Obamacare"/"ACA" at all, and instead take a bunch of parts of the law and ask if they support them individually (like "do you support requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions?"), you see less opposition, and even see a majority of Republican voters supporting some of its provisions.
By that logic, we can never pass anything, ever. And that more or less is represented with congredd Grdidlock for the past 20 years. Is that a better outcome?
I see it as Sprint vs. Waterfall. Except Waterfall takes 8-10 years in policy to do and no one is in office long enough to finish the task. So we gotta pass in a lot of smaller tickets until we get there.
Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in much of his opposition than Sinema was, and sometimes he was actually right.
He's about as "shades of gray" as a politician gets.
Sure. My point is both are preferable to a MAGA enabler. If you lose perspective and start aiming for perfection at the expense of the good enough, you lose power.
At least with a MAGA enabler things can get bad enough that people might realize what they have to lose.
Never could convince her that her team could do the same in the opposite direction of motion.
* American but also actually a communist, not a Democrat
This is a part (far from all, but a real part) of why they turned to someone who claimed to be willing to get things done—even if he had to break rules to do it.
I'm not going to say that I wish those seats had been filled by Republicans, instead, because I don't know how much worse that would have made things. It's very possible that we still would've gotten 2 Trump terms even so.
But I don't think it's fair to paint them as unquestionably better, when the second-order effects are real, and, while impossible to measure, potentially devastating.
Expensive, yes.
I was just pointing to an example of why healthcare reform is politically difficult. One relevant to the ACA was ending discrimination based on preexisting conditions, which caused a majority of people's premiums to go up to subsidize those who are chronically ill. Morally, most people agree it's the right thing to do, but it was politically disastrous since one person gets one vote.
There are plenty of treatments that aren’t subsidized, but it’s not as restricted as it might be perceived. There’s very little whining about things not being covered, because most things are.
Compare the "restriction" section of Ozempic vs metformin. Ozempic is absolutely not allowed to be prescribed as a first resort against type 2 diabetes. Contrast that with a lot of American private insurance, particularly at good employers, where restrictions are much looser. This performative generosity for common treatments, especially trendy ones, is why most people view their private insurance positively, much higher than the state of healthcare in the country.
The other problem is that the Democrats don't seem to realize that incremental change doesn't really work when the system of government is messed up like it is. Every little small-ball policy the Dems try to push through can just be undone later by administrative gimmicks as long as we have the level of ambiguity we do about executive power. Beyond that, they can be rolled back by countervailing legislation because the Republicans are focused on gaming the system. "Substantive" radical policies like universal healthcare are unlikely to be achievable without first enacting "procedural" radical policies like anti-gerrymandering rules or abolishing the senate.
Indeed. Because anyone who is numerate enough to do the division quickly realizes that this works out to about $300 per person, and stops being excited about the Wowie Big Number.
Obama had a plan early on to be inspired by Lincoln's cabinet of rivals and to try to unite the parties. Because of that he didn't push nearly as hard on the right wing of his party early on like Lieberman, who were the holdouts who pushed for the lack of a public option to have true universal healthcare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor...
This was the Republican alternative to the time's Hillarycare proposal, and was authored by the Heritage Foundation of Project 2025 fame.
Yes it didn't get debated, but the formal debate stage of a bill is pretty late in the process these days. It's been theater at best for at least a century. The actual debating happens at the stage the HEART Act got to.
It got dropped because the Republicans won congress in the midterms and didn't actually want to change anything about health care; the HEART act was just what they came up with as a proposal if they were to be forced.
Right? So Republicans did not support it, or want it. It was just part of the Clinton Plan politics and negotiation. When Clinton failed, HEART totally disappeared.
recently Republicans have been trying to distance themselves from it
Of the 18 Republicans who co-sponsored it, none are still in politics, 14 of the 18 are now dead. Republicans today have literally nothing to do with it. It is getting silly to say a Republican today has any connection or responsibility for this proposal that never even came close to a vote, and not one current Republican has any connection to.
The ideal Republican plan was to have no healthcare reform. When faced with the proposition that no reform would cease to be tolerated, this was absolutely the Republican plan for health care reform, broadly supported by Republican leadership.
> Of the 18 Republicans who co-sponsored it, none are still in politics, 14 of the 18 are now dead. Republicans today have literally nothing to do with it. It is getting silly to say a Republican today has any connection or responsibility for this proposal that never even came close to a vote, and not one current Republican has any connection to.
They still mostly existed in politics at the passing of the ACA and the initial push back from the Republicans. Both the HEART Act and the ACA existed within the US's Sixth Political System.
To claim they wanted that bill is entirely deceptive.
Some side notes. It was introduced by Lincoln Chafee, who then switched to the democratic party. Heritage itself disowned it. The author later wrote, "I headed Heritage's health work for 30 years, and make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court." There was also never any intent to have a punitive mandate, just a tax credit would be lost if for people who didn't buy insurance - more carrot than stick.
It was the republican plan for healthcare reform. They didn't want to reform healthcare, but when forced to, this was their plan. And it had been for years; the Heritage Foundation had been kicking the plan around since about 1989.
> It is also somewhat of a mischaracterization to call it a mandate for health insurance, it was much more narrowly focused covering catastrophic events.
That's not my read. Can you point to where in the draft text of the act that makes you say that?
> Some side notes. It was introduced by Lincoln Chafee, who then switched to the democratic party.
It was introduced by John Chafee, lifelong Republican.
And it was co-sponsored by Bob Dole (Senate Minority leader before becoming Majority leader the next year, and who would become the Presidential nominee in 1996), and had the support of Newt Gingrich, the Republican Leader of the House, and frankly the leader of the Republican party at the time.
It had broad Republican support including by Republican leadership.
> Heritage itself disowned it. The author later wrote, "I headed Heritage's health work for 30 years, and make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court."
Yeah, over night any Republican caught supporting the ACA would be metaphorically tarred and feathered by the party. That didn't mean that they didn't previously literally write the basis for the ACA, only that they were trying not to get blamed for it.
> There was also never any intent to have a punitive mandate, just a tax credit would be lost if for people who didn't buy insurance - more carrot than stick.
It literally called for a tax to enforce the individual mandate. Honestly more of a tax than the ACA which simply withheld tax refunds and at the time was still grey area as to whether or not that actually counted as a true tax.
> SEC. 1501. REQUIREMENT OF COVERAGE.
>
> (a) In General.--Effective January 1, 2005, each individual who is
> a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States shall be
> covered under--
> (1) a qualified health plan, or
> (2) an equivalent health care program (as defined in
> section 1601(7)).
> (b) Exception.--Subsection (a) shall not apply in the case of an
> individual who is opposed for religious reasons to health plan
> coverage, including an individual who declines health plan coverage due
> to a reliance on healing using spiritual means through prayer alone.
...
> ``SEC. 5000A. FAILURE OF INDIVIDUALS WITH RESPECT TO HEALTH INSURANCE.
> ``(a) General Rule.--There is hereby imposed a tax on the failure
> of any individual to comply with the requirements of section 1501 of
> the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993.
People aren’t excited by half measures that let health insurance companies generate tons of money and CONTINUOUSLY raise premiums. People still go bankrupt receiving cancer care here.
The person who gets free healthcare and cuts overall costs by destroying health insurance middle man will be massively popular and, once the effects are borne out, win congress in a landslide.
Perhaps Obama couldn't have made it happen, but he didn't try. He could have made a speech about "how we will do because not because it's easy, but because it's possible because every other western nation has this same basic thing." But here we are with a crappy compromise.
In terms of almost any possible quality of life metric you can think of Europe is ahead of the US.
That combined with just a breathtaking level of ignorance of what Europe is actually like in any meaningful sense. You saw this a lot in this NYC election where they were trying to paint Mamdani as an actual communist because well over half of the country has no idea what “democratic socialism” means let alone communism.
I remember the parent of an ex of mine who was from NY tell me how lucky they were to have such incredible insurance and medical coverage when his wife got cancer because he only had to pay the first $100k/yr out of pocket and then the rest was “free”. It was repeatedly stressed to me what a rare thing this was and most people would be in such a worse position.
Anyways, long story short… They hit that limit by February and then spent the rest of the year getting denied by their insurance company until the day she died. But at least she was treated at “the best cancer hospital in the world”.
Last time I checked, Australia had better cancer survival rates than the US, higher quality of life, greater expected life span, and a hybrid medicare / private insurance system that covered almost the entire population such that very few faced medical bills outside the reach of their income (or lack thereof).
I had a stent inserted to clear a clot that travelled to my heart from a knee injury - free (surgery, two and half days in hospital, follow up recovery and lifestyle advice appoints).
The ambulance cost more as I was between St John's Ambulance covers at the time, that was $500 which I was happy to pay (myself, my father, and multiple family members have all worked as volunteer ambulance drivers and paramedics over the years).
You're not wrong, but this thread makes it sound like the US is completely backwards when it's off by 1-2% and higher than other "socialist" countries.
Laughable statement, considering Europeans give a leg and a arm to live in America.
Just talk like a normal adult with your normal account and accept that maybe some people think your opinion is bad and you lose an internet point.
For what it’s worth, not that you asked but this year in particular has really only cemented my view of the general US citizen as a very scared individual who is terrified to stand up for anything.
What you’re doing right now is actually great example of that under what could only be described as the lowest stakes scenario possible.
You could probably learn something from the “cheese eating surrender monkey” French who you’re all to happy to compare yourselves against but at least they are willing to fight for what they have.
Is this satire? Or do you not believe that racism exist in America?
No we don't.
Sure, most of us used to like the USA a decade ago, but even back then it would have to be a right weirdo (everywhere has them) to think that highly of the USA.
If anything, I'm thinking of a healthcare cost comparison a while back, which said that for the cost of a single hip replacement in the USA, someone could fly from the USA to Spain, get it done privately, spend a year just living normally in Spain while recovering, break the other hip and get that replaced too, and still come out ahead.
(I never fact-checked that meme, what with me living in the UK at the time where the NHS supplies everything free at point of use unless you opt for private care that very few bother with; I'm now in Germany whose system is basically what the UK left fears is dangerously American and the US right fears is dangerously like the UK's NHS).
Or some of the stuff we hear about Americans considering the 2nd amendment to be a "god given right". No thanks: safety isn't where I can get armed up, it's where I don't need to.
But now? Trump's reelection has coincided with a lot of people changing from thinking of the place as "ally sharing our values" to just "a necessary partner", a downgrade to significantly less than you describe.
Sensible voices are a rare thing in this climate and it’s incredibly easy to stand out as one if you stop playing by a set of rules that were intentionally designed to make you fail in the first place.
Honestly I think the American exceptionalism shit is a cancer on the society and I find it incredibly hard to distinguish from the "Deutschland über alles" nonsense that the Germans went through. It’s just a fundamentally flawed way of looking at the world. It’s like a story a small child might believe but it really doesn’t stand up to even the most gentle of scrutiny.
I think it would be wise for us to remember that it is/was not only Americans that believed in American exceptionalism, but immigrants that were actually trying to come to the States among other possible options who believed in it-- prior to this administration that is. You would have to admit it would be a ridiculous thing for them to do if they couldn't distinguish it from "Deutschland über alles".
>>You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.
This was the Republican president Ronald Reagan speaking. The world has caught up obviously since then in this regard as well, but prior to this administration it would not be a stretch to say this was true of America more than any other nation.
The louder you get with this type of message, the more you will push people farther away.
FWIW I lived in 3 continents including Europe and the densest cities in the world. The best QOL I've had is in deep red voting rural areas.
Also we aren’t talking about your personal preferences here in terms of quality of life but about hard data. The numbers aren’t even close. The one you listed as your personal favorite comes last in those categories.
I’m not trying to be rude but it sure seems like you’ve taken your preference of living in a rural area vs living in a city and then tried to build an argument around that.
How many genuinely ex-MAGA people do you know? I think for most people that number is at absolute best a very low single digit number.
There are a whole bunch of people out there who are entirely disenfranchised who just can’t be bothered to vote however who could be inspired to do so and this thread is very literally about someone who went with that strategy and won.
I’m simply making the argument that you should spend your time there instead and keep your integrity in the process. People actually want something to believe in and a concept of fairness, affordability, justice and anti-corruption is an incredibly wide tent already. Stick with that.
There is a deep, foundational information problem that would need to be overcome for this to ever actually happen. Medicare, for example, is viewed incredibly favorably, but tons of people don’t even know it’s a government program! This survey found only 58% of people over 65 recognized that: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/medicare/medica...
We are in an information twilight zone where perception of policy outcomes is basically entirely dependent on choice of news sources.
For ten years, every year, drop the eligibility age by 1 year. Then for the next ten years, every year, drop the eligibility age by 2 years. Maybe keep going at 2 years every year from there, but it should probably be adjusted over time as the effects of rising enrollment show the acheivable enrollment rate.
In the meantime, start covering all kids with Medicaid from birth to X, adding 6 months every year for the first 10 years, then 1 year per year until it overlaps with most people getting enough social security credits to be eligible for Medicare. At that point, you can probably just make Medicaid available for everyone, if you don't have 40 social security credits by age 35, you probably qualify for Medicaid under current rules. Again, it'd be helpful for Congress to supervise and adjust as needed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/upshot/one-third-dont-kno...
They barely passed ACA after over a year of negotiating with the Republicans and removing lots off provisions from it. How do you expect someone to just come along and pass an even more radical reform?
Bad casual reasoning. There is so little evidence that voters care about policies years before they go into effect.
The push for the ideal might have locked in something generational. Maybe.
But many of the things he did were dubious and ACA is a perfect example of this. It's little more than an subsidy for private insurance companies whose profits dramatically increased relatively shortly after adapting to it. Universal healthcare doesn't have to be adversarial towards private insurance, but it should not directly drive increases in profits because, especially once its mandated + subsidized, profits need to be controlled as the government is effectively guaranteeing them.
Medical loss ratios (insurers must pay a minimum percent of premium revenue on medical costs) are obviously insufficient since they do nothing to motivate lower costs. On the contrary, it directly incentivizes maximizing costs which is exactly what's happened. For one specific datum medicare administrative costs are around 2% - private insurance administrative costs start around 12%.
---
Basically there is no way this was even remotely close to the most socially motivated (I don't see radical as a desirable adjective) package he could get have gotten passed. And now with the country so divided, it's unlikely we'll be getting anything better anytime in the foreseeable future, because whichever side tries to pass it will simply be opposed by the other, regardless of merit. Hopefully Mamdani isn't a complete failure, because more parties in power is perhaps one way to break the divides in society.
What are you basing this on? Again, Pelosi lost her House because of ACA. Republicans shut down the government multiple times trying to repeal it. They narrowly missed, but because the compromise was powerful. Had Pelosi and Obama pushed harder on ACA, chances are high it would have never passed.
I’m not saying it was perfectly calibrated. But the problems you’re mentioning would have meant battling entire new categories of powerful interest groups. That's what, in part, sank HillaryCare.
Watching old Obama speeches, I find him mostly run-of-the-mill. Trump, whether or not you like him, is far more charismatic - his success is built on his charisma. Also, look up Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan speeches, by maybe that isn't what you mean by 'modern times'.
Print out one of his speeches and read them. His success is built on backlash against the shock of seeing a black president.
Charisma is a different axis to all of that.
A lot of people, for reasons I cannot even empathise with, demonstrably like him. One could even describe their response as "idolising" him. (Where does one draw the line between "a cult of personality" and "apotheosis" anyway?)
It's part of why the ancient Greeks thought government came in cycles, with democracy being only a transitory state.
Her primary theory is that it is built out of a combination of formidable and approachable traits/behaviors. Naturally, there is a fair amount of personal variability in what we perceive as "formidable" and "approachable", so what seems charismatic will vary from person to person; it's not fully objective.
But her theory is that this is why you can have people who are, objectively, more repugnant still read as charismatic, and people who are very pleasant read as less charismatic: the latter may be very approachable, but they don't have enough formidability to synthesize that into charisma, while the former add just enough approachability that they can.
If the words are bad then it suggests his success comes from elsewhere, possibly charisma (whatever that means).
> His success is built on backlash against the shock of seeing a black president.
Assuming that's true, lots of people could have capitalized from that; why him in particular?
People talk about Trump because he/his team excels at distraction through outrage. He's not charismatic, he's dopaminergic.
Did you watch the 60 minutes interview?
I mean, even his supporters are constantly trying to "decipher" his messaging. He is constantly failing to recite basic facts correctly, and I don't mean the general lies, but you know stuff like basic geography/history knowledge and stuff. He doesn't come off as primary education pilled.
But sure, it's all fake news. He'll make the US great again and all. Any day now.
I wonder if you would challenge yourself the same with Mamdani or Obama, or somewhat unrelated: Hunter Biden.....
Trump is nearly opposite, he doesn't speak as well clearly. But his actions are stronger, and thats what the voters want. They don't want a smoother talker that tells you what you want to hear and does nothing.
Obama is charismatic and one of the best to give a speech.
Really? Maybe a decade ago, but now? He cannot keep a coherent thought for more than a few seconds, so every speech is a fucking rambling mess. Even subtitles cannot help make sense of it most of the time.
> - his success is built on his charisma
Bullshitter sales people can be very charming at times, I will give you that.
Curtis Sliwa was significantly to the left of both Eric Adams and Cuomo on a whole host of issues, which is one of the many reasons why Trump refused to endorse Silwa (they hate each other). If we didn't have a Sinema or Manchin, we might have liberal republicans like a Silwa who would be objectively better if you're a liberal.
And they only passed it by bypassing the fillibuster and using the budget reconciliation process.
But arguably, if they were more aggressive and offered bigger benefits, they'd get more support. The GOP has been extremely aggressive, generally. People don't vote for those hesitant and afraid of conflict.
> You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
True, and it's also true if the Dems had a few more Sanderses and Warrens - and then they'd have a solid majority rather than one that caved like Manchin. But they'd need a bunch more to pass a healthcare bill without reconciliation.
The average person wants someone who "totally dunked on the other guy, dude" and then loses the election but "never sold out, man". Part of the wisdom of supporting Rosa Parks and not just the first Black woman who was in that position is about being good at winning so your cause advances.
Our lives in America are so good that winning or advancing your cause doesn't really move the needle as much as "making a stand, dude" is. Given that life is really good and change isn't immediately to acute suffering, almost all politics for the average person is about posturing and signaling.
From closer to home, people are annoyed in San Francisco that the state speed camera laws are not permanent and the fines are not humongous for someone going 100 mph over the limit. Most people fantasize about things happening as God placing down edict from upon high, rather than the thing that can happen on the political frontier.
This is the essence of politics.
Look at Bill Clinton's net worth when he left office and now.
It wasn't the final stage of their career but only the beginning.
Then they govern from the centre right status quo which aligns more with their actual beliefs.
I saw a similar thing in the UK where the newly-minted Labour government thought they could combat ReformUK on asylum policy. Luckily, I think they're slowly starting to realise that, no matter how hard they tack, ReformUK will always promise something more insane and unworkable.
They'll find something on Zohran, or else he'll make some compromise that makes the left turn on him. It's just a matter of time.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
He "called for" a bill that would pass (barely, as it required a filibuster-proof majority that will never happen again in our lives), and it did. It's absolutely infuriating to me the extent to which the American electorate fails to understand basic civics. Presidents take all sorts of legislative positions, but they don't run congress and never have.
And so the cycle continues. Presidential candidate says "I thinks Foo is good", electorate takes that as a promise to deliver Foo. Foo fails to appear, electorate gets mad and votes for the other guy promising to deliver Bar.
Never mind that MetaFoo actually passed, Bar is impossible, and the Barite party wants to enact hungarian notation via martial law. Electorate is still pissed off about Foo, somehow.
Obama did not do a U-turn. It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King.
Subject to all of those checks and balances you hear about and then some.
You people act as if he could wave a wand and just sweep away everyone and everything who was against his big ideas, when the opposite was at play.
Please, grow a better sense of politics.
The Dems can no longer use the excuse that the president is handcuffed. Trump 2.0 is showing us what the president can do. The dems consistently use that excuse to prevent popular policies from being enacted. Obama even had a ~6mo super majority where he could have codified abortion rights. But instead they keep it around as an outstanding issue because it is a good fundraising issue.
Again, I implore you all to grow a bit smarter.
Obama understood this and respected the office. Trump took a fat dump on the office and I'm not sure if our country's values will ever recover from this race to the bottom.
At a bare minimum, he signed into law the NDAA of 2012, which authorized the government to ignore people's civil liberties in cases where they were suspected of terrorism. On that basis I do not personally agree that he respected the office.
Obama is not some good hearted hero who had his hands tied. He ran on pretty progressive campaign because it polled well and when he came to office he just did what his sponsors wanted - keep status quo.
It was keeping the money in pockets of billionaires and corporations while talking about promise of potential change by the most charismatic president ever.
That's why people don't trust democrats.
Are you talking about Obama or Trump?
> US president is still the most powerful political position on the planet. They can do stuff you know.
And this is why people don't trust republicans. They are all "checks and balances" and "Constitution" until the dictatorship they want is upon them.
Biden try to forgive student loans. The courts blocked him. They clearly cannot just "do stuff you know". Not without risk of impeachment for executive overreach.
These limits of power were always Obamas excuse when he was supposed to push for something inconvinient. That was the narrative to not try too hard. When you start to look at what hes done… the small things, the mundane and the stuff he had clearly power over. It's not good. Biden was very different in that aspect.
I don't want a liberal Trump.
If a Democrat did any of the hundreds of actions performed this year, they'd be blocked by the SCOTUS, and then impeached by the House because they ignored the SCOTUS. And probably Convicted by Senate.
A democrat has not been able to do something as bold as blasting through the courts since FDR (and for that time, the term "democrat" may not even be the correct word to use), and that was under a depression with very popular support from the people. Imagine if congress flipped and fought as hard against SS as they did against the ACA. The Silent and Boomer generations would be in shambles decades later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla...
Snowden has also spoken about this at length, saying he expected a change when Obama was elected due to his campaigning against the PATRIOT Act, but there was no change. This is only one of many policies in which Obama changed his stance after he became President.
Based on Rahm Emanuel's advice, the Obama administration did not focus political capital on the federal judiciary. Not only did Obama fail to get RBG to retire when she could be confidently replaced by a liberal, he didn't take judicial placements in the lower courts as seriously as he should have. The courts are substantial part of how we got here.
Yes, Obama was not a king. But there was stuff he absolutely could have done, especially during his first two years when he had the trifecta, that he didn't take seriously.
I imagine there was a lot of complacency based on the (erroneous) assumption that Hillary Clinton would be his successor.
RBG was a 75 year old cancer survivor in 2008. She should have stepped down in 2010 and the Obama administration should have put public pressure on her to do so.
But by all accounts Obama did not push her very hard or treat this as a priority. He shouldn't have just asked nicely and then gone away once she said no. They could have built a public media narrative around pressuring her to retire.
Do you people not understand the "anti-feminist" backlash this would have caused?
Y'all are really doing a whole lot of checkers thinking for what is a chess game.
...I mean c'mon now. Congress passed what they could and it cost the Dems greatly. Why are we pretending Obama could have gotten more?
What was the definition of insanity again?
How about this time we actually do it and stop blaming glue for not being a welding mold? Rent controls aren't supposed to be long term. Mamdami realizing that is already a good sign. So I'll see if he can get housing projects off the ground next.
ACA is a failure and the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time. Income inequality skyrocketed under him as well. Anyone who wasn't rich enough to afford some sort of asset like stocks or real estate was left behind and is now suffering.
They can't deny coverage for pre-existing conditions anymore, but insurers still have hundreds of other ways to avoid paying.
There's no silver lining in the U.S. healthcare system -- it's built to exhaust, confuse, and bankrupt patients. And it's only gotten worse in recent years. (Will only get worse with the addition of more AI.)
Joe Lieberman, a supposed Democrat, killed any real chance for reform we had in our generation. He then left Congress and quickly died -- his legacy is the broken healthcare system we have today, totally rigged against the very patients it's supposed to serve.
And the Republicans on the Supreme Court that hobbled what the Democrats managed to narrowly get through the political process.
But sure, direct all the anger for that towards Democrats, that will result in better Healthcare any day now. I hear Trump has concepts of a plan that he's been working on for over a decade that he'll let us know about in just 2 weeks.
And meanwhile the republican plan was to do nothing or actively make things worse than ignoring the problem. Why are some people seemingly hardwired to just blame democrats for any or everything? Because the plans they have don't immediately benefit them, the middle class person who was never down on their luck?
Even then, I fail to think of any policy that legitmately benefits the middle class either. Did abortion bans improve your quality of life? Do immigration raids help your 401k? Did that cut to EV credits get you better public transit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law
> Murc’s Law is typically phrased as: "the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics".[5] [6] It reflects a perceived journalistic double standard, where Democrats are held responsible for political outcomes regardless of context, whereas Republican obstruction or extremism is treated as a given. This framing, critics argue, absolves Republicans of responsibility and creates an unbalanced political narrative.
Which, somehow is a weird outcome of the "Two Santas Theory[0]. I'm not sure why folks actually buy into it, but they apparently do.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Wanniski#The_Two_Santa_Cl...
Just because a piece of a legislation includes painful compromises doesn't mean we should ignore its huge wins.
Neither sides most ardent supporters was willing to accept anything that looked like a compromise and so you end up with things as they are now, with someone where compromise shouldn’t happen because there is no practical compromise.
US politics has collapsed down to the scorpion and the frog.
Because to those who are now getting hit with huge insurance bills as a direct effect of that compromise, and may have to go without insurance at all, it is a loss.
And nothing has been done to address the underlying reasons and bad incentives that have led to this outcome. Which is also a failure.
Because the Republicans slashed the premium tax credits to pay for tax cuts for rich people.
Politics in the USA has basically gridlocked to it being much cheaper to shit on the other guy than to fix things. In two party system you can actually win by only making the other guy look worse, which only requires breaking things in a way that can be pointed at the other guy, somehow we are stuck in this local minima.
The ACA was passed in 2014. Congress (both Republicans and Democrats) have had since then to get off their butts and do something to fix the serious flaws it came with. Flaws that made insurance too unaffordable for millions of people so they had to risk it and go uninsured.
Years Pres Senate House SC
2013-2015 D D(+8) R(+33) R(+1)
2015-2017 D R(+10) R(+59) -(+0)
2017-2019 R R(+4) R(+47) R(+1)
2019-2021 R R(+8) D(+35) R(+1)
2021-2023 D D(+0.5) D(+9) R(+3)
2023-2025 D D(+2) R(+9) R(+3)
2025-2027 R R(+8) R(+4) R(+3)
Dems haven't had solid control of all three legislative bodies since it passed, and Republicans have vocally made it their priority to oppose the ACA in any way possible, and are unwilling to give an inch. Even the hair thin margin post-2020 was unusable for this due to the handful of DINOs that all needed to vote in lockstep.
Meanwhile, R's had unilateral control of the government for four straight years, and they voted to make everyone's lives worse, as you're complaining about. They said over and over they were going to repeal it, like you suggest, and then turned around and made it obvious that was a blatant lie. Because despite its flaws, even the gutted ACA is still wildly popular and a vast improvement over the previous status quo. (It turns out keeping workers healthy is critical for the economy)
This is not a symmetric problem. It really is one party making it worse.
The Democrats did have full control when they first passed the ACA and they ended up getting in their own way.
But I never said that the Democrats were supposed to fix it on their own. I said both parties are to blame.
It shouldn't require one team have full control for something to happen. That's the real issue. They refuse to work together, and somehow this gets them more support (votes). Both sides. Total shit show.
They didn’t. They had to heavily compromise with an Independent.
> After the Finance Committee vote on October 15, negotiations turned to moderate Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid focused on satisfying centrists. The holdouts came down to Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who caucused with Democrats, and conservative Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson. Lieberman's demand that the bill not include a public option[161][175] was met,[176]
> But I never said that the Democrats were supposed to fix it on their own. I said both parties are to blame.
This doesn’t make any sense, because 99% of Dems have tried to increase access to healthcare, and 99.9% of Repubs have tried to reduce access to healthcare. The sole exception being when McCain provided his vote to not repeal ACA.
This is the problem. All conversations about policy lead to "it's the Republicans fault" or "it's the Democrats fault", never about the actual substance of the issue or any attempts to fix the underlying problems.
The fact that both parties think they're "winning the game" right now by shutting down the government is a joke.
The Dems (by and large) bring up bills to provide paid parental leave, increase minimum salaries for overtime exempt workers, fund education, increase access to healthcare, and here you are saying they don’t focus on the substance of the actual issues, whatever that means. Meanwhile, the only thing Repubs have done is cut taxes, and block all those efforts.
> The fact that both parties think they're "winning the game" right now by shutting down the government is a joke.
The fact that you would even bring up both parties when one has control of all 3 branches of government is a joke.
@grok are more or pess people uninsured since the ACA was passed in the USA?
(The answer is obvious btw)
It really doesn't. All it shows is that team R is following it's usual playbook of "The government is broken - elect me, and I'll make sure of it."
> Democrats could shove through enough votes to repeal ACA to make health insurance cheaper for lower-risk groups without tax credits
The only true part of that statement is that they could get enough votes to repeal it without replacement. But it wouldn't make anything cheaper.
The only way insurance would get cheaper is if it went back to not covering pre-existing conditions, which is contrary to the whole point of insurance.
It's wild that you're blaming the dems for... Not repealing without replacement, and pushing us straight into a completely broken shitshow?
> lower-risk groups
Oh, I understand now. You're are explicitly unhappy that the dems aren't agreeing to your plan to massively hike rates for anyone with a pre-exisiting condition, or literally any complication that would get them discriminated against prior to the ACA.
Sorry, that's a shitty thing for you to be fighting for, and they are in the right to not do it.
It's just the people that have tricked you, have used statistical correlation and cover of pre-existing condition to hide the fact what they're actually doing is robbing from the poorer to subsidize the richer.
Older people are sicker and older people are wealthier, but older sicker people on ACA plans are not wealthier than the median.
It's a sleight of hand to collate the two (old-rich and old-sick), but sure, if this is such a large concern, the solution is adding means testing, not just leaving sick people with care they can't afford.
They then all lost their seats to tea-party and proto-maga types who were screeching about FEMA internment camps and death panels killing grandma.
That means I, as someone with healthy lifestyle habits, has to pay largely the same premium as someone who smokes, is obese, and doesn't exercise. And sure enough, life expectancy in the US immediately stalled after the law's implementation: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni.... Exactly what economics would predict would happen.
It’s nice the above can no longer happen. You could, at the same time, still allow insurers to charge a premium to smokers and obese and for other lifestyle risks within one’s control. They are not mutually exclusive.
Life expectancy flatlining could be any number of things. Correlation != causation
Similar laws existed in EU countries long before US, and EU countries also saw a decline in life expectancy during those years: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
Do you live a healthier lifestyle than every single other person in your insurance plan or are you just a hypocrite who’s decided the line is acceptable when it includes you, but not one inch beyond that?
It is the basic duty of every human to do their best to make sure every other living human is afforded a life of simple human dignity. Full stop. We have the resources. Let's just do it.
Preventative/propylactic care is orders of magnitude cheaper than treatment once a disease has manifested. It makes sense to me to punish people for not doing this care, thereby choosing to impose more strain on an already overburdened system.
Note that GP only mentioned things we have control over -- exercise, weight, not smoking. Of course I agree that it would be cruel to disadvantage pre-existing conditions.
Yes, if everyone gets cancer at the same time then Health Care is boned. But then again, so is society. So why worry about that worst case scenario?
>Note that GP only mentioned things we have control over -- exercise, weight, not smoking.
We couldn't pass laws to help control what companies put in food, and failed to subsidize healthier food options. I wish you the best of luck with healthcare trying to pull off that endeavor with punishments for obesity. I'm guessing it wouldn't be poolitically popular.
If this was so easy, what is the plan?
I live in Texas. Look around me. Who's building these 500,000 dollar homes? Not fatass white people. And who is buying them? Not the people building them.
This is really a matter of choice. There is a level of treatment that most people could have with far less friction. We just have decided to organize our economy otherwise.
Broadly, we need to stop seeing our economy as a zero sum game. It's dehumanizing. So what if there are a few bad actors that abuse the situation? Most don't. If everyone is doing something harmful, eg smoking, then we need strong public education, etc.
This is despite no-one paying (directly) for health care.
Would you be willing to submit to invasive investigations into how you live to identify any risk factors you have (both under your control, like choosing to drive, international travel, and not under your control, like genetic predisposition to heart disease) to ensure your premium can be accurately calculated?
Blaming people for their illnesses is something we have historically gotten wrong a lot, and regardless, it’s pretty inhuman as a society to leave people to suffer and die because they can’t afford healthcare.
To be fair, there are insurance policies (at least in the UK) which give you discounts if you drive "safely"[0] or health insurance that rewards you for "being active"[1].
[0] https://www.which.co.uk/money/insurance/car-insurance/how-bl...
[1] https://www.vitality.co.uk/rewards/ "you earn Vitality points by getting active or attending your health check-ups [...] rewards, including a reduced excess and lower renewal premiums"
Example 2 is private healthcare insurance, which does exist in the UK, but only about 10-15% of the population have it, and it's mostly about getting access to healthcare provision faster. These private providers can of course do what they like, same as in the US, with the caveat that everybody is entitled to free, comprehensive healthcare through the NHS if they don't have private healthcare insurance.
However, folks that can afford to sometimes like to skip the queue.
It's worth noting I suppose that the UK has significantly more in the way of 'sin taxes' than the US. For example, tax on cigarettes is 16.5% of the retail price plus £6.69 ($8.73) on a packet of 20, meaning on average cigarettes retail for around £15 (~$20). This compares to the US average of somewhere around $3 tax and retail of around $10 (varying based on state).
It's more complicated to calculate for alcohol, but again, the UK taxes alcohol more heavily than the US.
This additional tax revenue helps to fund the treatment of those who use those substances (although to be clear, it doesn't cover it fully).
https://fullfact.org/health/farage-smoking-revenue-nhs/
However, net cost to the state when you factor in inability to work, etc is estimated at twice the tax revenue.
Your point that smokers die younger and so cost the state less is a contentious topic with lots of debate. One thing that is clear is that tobacco firms are actively pushing that narrative, which, given the industry’s history with regards to data and studies like this makes me instantly suspicious: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB995230746855683470
this is mostly about drawing a line between the tradeoffs of costs and the benefits of increased lifespan and better quality of life. almost no-one actually believes all of societies resources should be committed to healthcare to achieve some small marginal health gain. claiming people are inhuman because they want to draw the line differently is messed up.
The NHS for example today doesn’t spend infinite resources on any individual. In some cases, the decision is that the cost of treatment is not justified by the benefit.
Whether someone is a smoker is a factor in that decision: how much longer they may live, their expected quality of life. Also their lifestyle is taken into consideration when determining the order of a transplant list, etc.
But the decision is never made based on their ability to pay.
"Smoking was associated with a moderate decrease in healthcare costs, and a marked decrease in pension costs due to increased mortality." https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001678
The UK did a study and they found that from the three biggest healthcare risks; obesity, smoking, and alcohol, they realize a net savings of £22.8 billion (£342/$474 per person) per year. This is due primarily to people with health risks not living as long (healthcare for the elderly is exceptionally expensive), as well as reduced spending on pensions, etc..
Usually it's just Trump, but my local congressman gets a lot of hate too.
Sometimes it is just "orange man bad" but cmon building an opulent ballroom and remodeling a bathroom in marble and having a grand old Halloween party while millions of Americans have no idea how they're gonna have their next meal is some Marie Antoinette shit. Sure that's not really a "policy" per se but it sure makes it look like he doesn't give a shit about policies that actually help the American people.
Granted, I acknowledge, that the US will likely still provide better care at the absolute high end, and asking most people to save that much can be quite a tall order, but from what I gather, a lot of people either bankrupt themselves, and end up paying much more than that and/or receive substandard care for conditions where treatment regime is established like treatable forms of cancer or congestive heart failure.
I remember Trump blasting Obama about Medicare, and proposing to 'open up' the system, introducing competition to drive prices down instead (which is the real problem of the US system, socially subsidizing it is just a bandaid fix imo). I guess not much has come off that.
Non-starter for the vast majority of Americans.
Cost of travel to Thailand < savings on medical procedures (with equivalent or better outcomes)
For starters, American insurance has a "maximum out-of-pocket" amount, which means the maximum you can possibly pay for healthcare costs. My plan, from just a regular unknown company doing boring things, has a maximum out of pocket of $5k for an individual. So there's no scenario where I'd ever benefit from spending "a couple tens of thousands of dollars" because even if I spend the whole year in an ICU bed at a cost of millions of dollars to the hospital, I only pay $5,000.
Also, "a lot of people either bankrupt themselves, and end up paying much more than that" doesn't make sense. Declaring bankruptcy means you don't pay the debt, you wouldn't pay a lot AND declare bankruptcy. You'd see the amount was too much to pay, declare bankruptcy, and have the debt wiped out.
Keep in mind that millions of Americans have essentially no assets that aren't protected in a bankruptcy (car, home and retirement accounts are generally safe). It's not like millionaires are going bankrupt from medical costs, it's people who had nothing to begin with declaring bankruptcy when they got hurt while uninsured and going back to zero (instead of negative).
The real problem of the US system isn't the subsidies for the poor, it's the opaque, convoluted billing system between insurance companies, pharmacy benefit managers, and providers. Billions of dollars are siphoned out of the system as profit to insurers and hundreds of millions are wasted on salaries for the bureaucracy of managing the billing system.
Bankruptcy isn't a magic get out of debt button. First you have to prove your inability to pay, which generally means not having much in the way of assets. So you probably have to spend a significant amount of money on the debt before bankruptcy is even an option. Then once you have successfully declared bankruptcy it means, aside from a few classes of protected assets (e.x. your primary residence if your sufficiently lucky to be a homeowner) your creditors get to divy up what you have left amongst themselves. THEN the debt is wiped away. It's a last resort that keeps every penny you earn for the rest of your life from going to creditors, not a way to walk away with your assets and lifestyle intact.
As it is we have a system of private "insurance" that can't consider the risk level of those being insured. All that means is the companies charge everyone else more to subsidize the cost of those who are more at risk.
That bastardizes the whole point of private insurance. I don't want to pay more for my car insurance because the person next door bought a Porsche and the insurance company isn't legally allowed to consider the cost of repairing a Porsche.
Don't get me wrong, morally I don't want to see anyone denied health insurance. I also don't want this half-in half-out program where its no longer really private health insurance nor is it a centralized single payer system.
If we don't want people's health to be dependent on insurance that's fine, but we should replace it with a system that isn't based on risk at all rather than bastardizing something that still sort of looks like risk-based insurance.
Insurers are welcome to consider risk factors... for populations in aggregate.
It turns their actuarial models into population-subset models instead of individual models.
Which is easily the most "fair" (to individuals) option.
Allowing insurers to consider individual risk factors (preexisting conditions, genetics, etc.) would make the advertising data mining industry seem quaint. And I don't think any American wants to live in that world.
So we can talk about whether insurers should be able to offer lifestyle incentives (yes!), preventative care incentives (yes!), and be backed by catastrophic reinsurers (like mortgages, maybe)... but enrolling people blindly is one of the best things ACA did.
(Unless one happens to be young, rich, family-less, healthy, and have no moral compunction about fucking others over for ones own benefit)
Also, important unremarked benefit of ACA -- capping maximum insurer "administration" costs.
Firsthand from inside the industry as it was implemented, I can tell you that drove efficiency improvements inside insurers, as they couldn't bill for broken, slow, manual processes in additional premiums.
Granted, it caused other problems (attempts to self-deal and harvest profits through quasi-related provider / pharmacy entities or Medicare Advantage), but it did focus insurers on being efficient facilitators.
It's effectively a regressive tax, transfer from the poorer to the richer, due to the way ACA caps the price spread.
The insurer must decide what subset (s) of the population a person fits into, preexisting conditions are a factor that would almost certainly weigh heavily on the risk factor for that subset.
Are you proposing that it is irrelevant with regards to an individual's risk if they have diabetes, for example? Or are you simply arguing that we aren't comfortable with the costs it would require for an individual with diabetes to get health insurance if that factor is considered?
I fall into the latter personally and would prefer a real solution to health care that isn't some form of insurance. As long as it is insurance, though, the former seems impractical.
American health insurance generally does this in two broad ways. (1) Insure a large enough population group that averages hold and you can price based on actuarial/statistical probabilities. (2) Negotiate deals with provider groups so that they get something they want and you can bound their prices.
Neither of those things are contingent on knowing anything about individuals.
Insurers will generally pick {more randomly-selected customers} over {knowing more about each customer} any day of the week.
Maybe I'm misreading you, but you seem to want insurance that's accurately priced to exactly your circumstances and health (say, how custom high value property insurance is sold).
That doesn't solve insurer's concentrated tail risk problem though, and it means you're fucked if you ever develop a complicated condition, like cancer.
Your other option was to continue as things were, with fewer people getting less healthcare. Would that have been more of a win?
Maybe you can alter healthcare so people are paying through the nose (either through highly regulated private entities coupled with incentives/mandates, or through taxes) but more people are covered, and so now they are less able to afford housing, good education, healthy foods, child care, and other stuff. Then they are not necessarily better off.
Without preexisting conditions your premiums go up only because they can't charge the higher risk individual for that risk. That is no longer insurance at least at the individual level - you're effectively being asked to vouch for, and pay for, someone you never met.
That is the basic premise of insurance. Collectivized risk. That you disagree with a specific detail in the implementation and that part, and that part only is vouching for someone else is undermining your point, not reinforcing it.
Everyone in the developed world has injected government heavily into healthcare, because its the lynchpin of a healthy and efficient workforce. That's the real solution.
If we just want healthcare to be covered for the entire population that's fine, but don't call it insurance.
Literally the purpose of insurance
The purpose of insurance is to mitigate the risk of a very costly but unlikely outcome by paying a smaller amount over time, thereby spreading that risk among those of similar risk.
Not being able to consider individual risk means that insurance makes no sense for those with a low risk profiles, because they’re in the same cohort as those who will _definitely_ file claims.
There's levels of broken-ness to healthcare in the US. Even if you allow health insurance to discriminate based on health conditions, it will still be broken in other ways.
Employer health insurance rates fan still get wonky for small businesses though. It probably can't happen today, but I was at a small business where everyone's rates went up shortly after one person was diagnosed with cancer and another one or two with diabetes.
That is an example of it not really being individual insurance though. The insurance company is just lumping the employees together and setting rates based on the relative risk of the whole group, not dissimilar from getting an individual policy where the rates are based on a group of one.
Health insurance is intended to mitigate the risk of unexpected high costs, not pay for your normal healthcare.
You're thinking of a healthcare _plan_. Trying to make the insurance model fit where it doesn't work is the root of the vast majority of our issues in the US.
With preexisting conditions off the table, my rates may go up only because someone else is a higher risk and the insurance company can't charge them for it.
I said this in another post, but morally I don't want others to be denied health care. I don't want health insurance at all in that case because insurance implies that you pay more for riskier coverage.
That's what social insurance/welfare systems do throughout the developed world -- make sure everyone's covered at some minimal level even if it wouldn't be profitable when evaluated individually; it's just using insurance companies as an arm of the state to pull it off.
If, as it seems, your only objection is to labeling it "insurance", that's not a substantive objection to the merit of the policy, only how it's marketed.
What insurers in some countries do is charge higher premiums for people who engage in high-risk behaviors, like smoking, drinking, or extreme sports. Those are all choices so it seems fair to charge a sin tax for them. Higher premiums would discourage risky behavior and improve the health of the country as a whole.
Are you sure about that? Plenty of medical conditions are the result, at least in part, of decisions a person makes.
A person with lung cancer seeking health care could very well have smokes for decades. A person with type 2 diabetes may very well have eaten poorly for decades. Obviously those aren't always directly linked to life choices, but they often can be.
Whether a past action caused a condition, sure, but where do you draw the line? If you become disabled in a car accident, despite knowing full well that accidents can happen, should you be denied insurance in future because you did something risky? What if you were a smoker for the decades when cigarette companies suppressed the research about how bad it was?
Also, how would you even prove that a condition was self-inflicted? My old dog had lung cancer despite (to my knowledge) never smoking (and nor did anyone else in the household). I lost a close family member to liver cancer despite being a lifelong teetotaller, but how would anyone even prove that? The moment you start means-testing people, you're adding a whole lot of extra cost to taxpayers and stress for patients.
Denying healthcare to the most vulnerable members of society is simply cruel. It is kicking them when they're down. Having the condition is punishment enough. We can do better than that.
It doesn't matter if someone intended for a decision to lead to higher risk, the only question at the point of signing an insurance policy is how risky that private company views the policy.
The whole insurance debate often feels misplaced. Many people simply don't want healthcare to depend on an insurance system. And I get that, I also would rather people be able to get the care they need regardless of their individual risk.
As long as we have anything claiming to be insurance that simply isn't how the system works. If the game is insurance the insurer should be able to consider individual risk. If we don't want that, build a system that isn't dependent on an insurance scheme at all.
Healthcare already being expensive doesn't make it amenable to that last option unlike insuring your laptop where you might be okay paying 2-5x the expected loss for peace of mind. Criticizing the method of addressing adverse selection is fine, but not the existence of it. You need something. There's no such thing as completely free market of health insurance. Any economist can easily explain this to you.
You see it all the time in the fight for everything.
Because San Francisco progressivism doesn’t win on a national stage.
The pendelum swings in multiple dimensions. MAGA went mainstream in a way the Tea Party and conservativism did not by abandoning policy purity in favour of, first, messaging, and later, idolatry.
The preserved component between MAGA's messaging and Mamdani's rise is populism and, to a lesser degree, divisive politics. Where MAGA failed and Mamdani may deliver is in pragmatism (and not being corrupt).
There is an opportunity to unify "abundance" policies with inclusive progressivism or villanisation of wealth. (I'm not convinced you can do both. If you want to pursue growth and cost of living, you need to turn the capital spigots. Accumulated capital facilitates that. If you want to tackle inequality and billionaires, you'll need to temporarily destabilise those capital structures. You'll also, presumably, be increasing the lower and middle classes' purchasing power, which limits how much public spending you can do without spiking inflation.)
San Francisco progressives can influence national politics. But anyone insisting on copy-paste purism is a godsend to MAGA.
Next step in MAGA is the open inheritance war between the original 2016 spirit and the 2024 donor class.
If the message that Democrats take from this is NY progressivism wins on a national stage, we'll certainly lose the next presidential election, and maybe even fail to gain a majority in either the House or Senate during the midterms.
That's my biggest fear.
Mamdani is a disciplined New York progressive. He’s left of the median voter. But the Mamdani that won the D primary was also left of the median NYC voter.
One can take a shallow policy lesson from this election. Or a deeper political lesson in the value of pragmatism and respect for the voter (versus the holier than thou crap that has polluted the far left).
I hope you are right, that he is more like Obama than Trump. Time will tell.
Personally, I haven't seen any evidence to support that hypothesis. If you have, I'd love to feel more assured you are right so please share.
Also, who are these current or former elected officials that fit the description "disciplined New York progressive" you refer to?
I'm truly not sure.
The guy named in the comment.
The day after election day 2016 I recall trying to reassure myself that another candidate who won had to be more disciplined when governing than when campaigning. That the rhetoric his campaign put out was only because his supporters were to the right of him. How sad I was to find out that wasn't true. Hope I'm not let down again.
What you are advocating for is the same bullshit that cost the Democrats the election in 2016, and in 2024. We've tried it your way and it is nothing but a losing strategy. People want progress, people want change. If a candidate can't at least have balls to lie about wanting that too, then they are unfit to win an election.
And maybe you are right. I'd love to see America move to 4 or more major parties. With the far-left and far-right of each separated out into their own parties. Would even settle for 3 parties.
And frankly, that's all besides the point: The reason exciting candidates do so well (Trump, Obama) is because voter turnout in the US is abysmal. It's gotten better (because the Fascists are excited for Trump, and everyone else is at least a bit energized by "oh god we can't have the fascists win"), but it's still very true that if you could convince at a quarter of the nonvoters (half of the half that might vote for you) to show up to the polls, you'd have a blowout victory the likes of which haven't been seen since the Bill Clinton campaigns.
The Democrats have been playing a strategy that tries to win over the rational fringe of the Republican party, but it's becoming increasingly obvious to apparently everyone but the DNC that those people don't exist. The kind of person who can be convinced to vote for Trump (ESPECIALLY TWICE) are not the kinds of people the Democrats will ever win over without royally pissing off most of their voter base.
But as you said, Obama didn’t govern the way he was perceived to have campaigned. And up and down this thread people express their disillusionment with him. Including you.
So I’m not sure how Obama campaigning to the left of how he governed makes the case that without Democrats moving to the center they can successfully turn out the number of supporters needs to win national elections. Unless we keep electing people then throwing them out next cycle because they didn’t govern like they campaigned (which is which I think we’re going to see for the foreseeable future)
Also this was almost 20 years ago. The country has gotten significantly more polarized since then. I’d make the case that since Obama the democratic part has failed to move to the center, but instead clung to identify politics. And in the case of presidential elections anointed the nominees rather than give citizens a real chance to choose them.
Hope I’m wrong, since Democrats don’t seem to be moving to the center and I also don’t want federal governments like this one. But I’m not convinced I am.
And polarization of the voter base helps that argument: people want real, radical change. On both sides of the political spectrum. The right is having their demands heard through the rise of Trump's fascist tendencies. The Democrats need to notice that the "moderate" Rebuplicans were more willing to vote for a fascist than for a moderate Democrat, and re-evaluate their platform.
You seem to suggest that politicians like Obama failed to achieve all their campaign promises, even though they could have. I suggest that they could not have. that it wasn't a bait and switch, but rather laying out an aspirational vision and then trying to achieve as much of that vision as reality allows for given the many needs and competing interests that co-exist in the world at any given time.
The takeaway should be there is no one size fits all.
Under Biden, donors pushed climate and identity politics that don’t work outside far-left Democrat strongholds. Then Kamala clumsily tried finding a centre in a multidimensional policy space which may not have a definable centre.
Mamdani won New York. But “moderates,” i.e. politicians who spoke to economic populism and don’t get distracted by the base, kept Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey. If we want to control national politics, we have to concede that West Virginia and Arizona voters don’t care about the same things as folks in Manhattan and San Francisco. That’s okay. We can embrace that diversity. But it also means we have to respect it and cut out the name calling because a promising candidate on the other side of the country doesn’t embrace your pet issue or identity language.
(Obama campaigned for Mamdani and Spannberger and Prop 50.)
Very well put, I hope others see this as well.
you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.
ACA is NOT a failure. It did address some really critical pain points but left others. There is no bill that can address every single pain point in a system that is as complex as the US healthcare.
Isn't it because Republicans spent a busy decade destroying it?
Compared to what? Is it really better to just be uninsured and go bankrupt over an ambulance ride?
This point alone makes your entire post suspect, even though parts of it are indeed true (it's a real shame guantanomo was not closed down).
(While searching for a decent article, I found [2] which has the hilarious-in-retrospect quote: "It just doesn't happen in, you know, traditional American justice that someone is essentially arrested and disappeared with no access to attorney" - oh the sweet innocence of 2017.)
[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/obama-congress-guanta...
[1] Which, to be fair, were hamstrung by his refusal to override the Republicans - a sensible approach (at the time) because a) the right wing would have gone mad (see: literally anything Obama did) and b) it opens the door for ruling by Presidential fiat which, sadly, was kicked wide open by Trump-1 and the entire wall removed by Trump-2 with the help of SCOTUS. On the whole, though, Obama wasn't as good as promised, definitely.
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantan...
That’s such a fraught statement, because the _opposite_ is claimed by supporters of the ACA after the repeal of the mandatory rule.
I’m old enough to remember the failed attempts for healthcare reforms under President Bill Clinton. The ACA felt like a miracle. It wasn’t what everyone wanted, but it was a start with principles. It has only been legislatively weakened over time, rather than improved.
Whatever alternative, employers should not be where we look for our healthcare. Can’t understand why anyone would trust their employer or expect good outcomes in the post-lifelong employment age.
I am also old enough to remember. And the health insurance companies spent heavily on lobbying and advertising ("death panels" and "healthcare rationing" and all sorts of other crap). It was sad.
Fast forward to the ACA and as I recall, insurers were spending USD1 million/day on lobbying efforts to block it.
I didn't think the ACA was a "miracle" though. Back then I used the analogy that it was like RFC 5386[0] ('Better Than Nothing Security'), as it wasn't single-payer and didn't even have a public option (thanks for nothing, Joe Lieberman -- I hope you're roasty-toasty in hell), but it was better than nothing.
I even have an ACA plan which costs me an enormous amount, but again, it's better than nothing.
This is absolute, unequivocal bullshit. I get that you aren't under 26, that you don't need subsidies, never were denied coverage for having had the audacity to get sick years before, and that you've never had to pay for expensive care, so you probably don't know what you're talking about in the first place, but suggesting it was a "failure" is absurd. The idea that actual coverage was less affordable after the ACA passed is such spectacular nonsense I don't even know where to start.
Sometimes it's ok to NOT have big, strident opinions on things you know you don't even slightly understand, and to ask questions or approach things with curiosity, instead.
What was so impressive about Obama was his incredible leadership skills and ability to get elected president DESPITE his racial and ethnic background. That the things the far left saw which drove them to support him were not the ones that led him to be such a good leader for the country.
In 2008, I spent most of the year backpacking through Europe before starting college in the fall. So I truly don't remember much of Obama's first campaign or the tone of it at the time. But there is very little evidence in my mind that Mamdani has any of Obama's abilities. Hopefully either I'm missing something again, or he'll rise to the occasion despite the lack of evidence to suggest it.
Stop calling concepts like ACA a failure and look in the mirror.
Then ignore it all and go enjoy some TV, video games, grubhub any obligation to yourself away; you earned it.
TLDR: You will see more Mamdanis in other cities. This is a treasure trove for MAGA. Expect at least 12 years of secure nationwide wins for whoever is championing that platform
> I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message
This is the gist of the PR campaign, voters fell for. It goes in line with him getting away with being “grassrootsy” when in fact he got tremendous funding from the typical NGOs (Open Society etc) and is a son of a Professor who was/is basically paid to tell American and African Top 5% why white people are bad.
His win also shows the effect migration has on elections. Immigration inherently is a deal where incumbent residents define the terms, and when the other party returns the favor by electing anti-incumbents into office some incumbents will have profound buyer’s remorse.
Fertile soil for the right.
Mamdani’s success also puts a spotlight on foundational problems of the democrats.
After all Mamdani is charismatic, yes, but more importantly he appealed on the issues. His policies will be abysmally failing to resolve the problems he criticized, yes - but that is unimportant to the voter. Important is that he believably criticized them.
How is it, that these well-established circles of the democrats, these well oiled machines, where in states like CA or NY (or most US cities) mayorships, senatorships, congressional seats, and governorships are basically handed out by the DNC, fail to win on those issues? It’s not like making life affordable is not a core branding of the party.
Well, it appears that the DNC gerrymandered itself to death. The dissolution of political contest from the public into internal primaries has stymied the platform’s vitality to a point where it can be easily hijacked by radicals.
Expect many more Mamdani-esque wins locally. Which will mean many wore wins for MAGA nationally.
You should know this better than the US, but our "democrats" are center right for the rest of the world. The goal is to sound progressive but then act in neoliberal ways to appeal to donors, after the attention isn't on them. I call these "Establshment Democrats", more concerned with keeping the status quo and being a PR machine to the people than actually making policy that benefit the people.
That's why Mamdami can cut through by saying the things that Establshment Dems hated. And early on in his campaign when he gained momentum you can see the resistance against him by the Establishment, up to Cuomo decided to run independent after the primaries. I can't speak for the common person, but those actions speak a lot louder than any words Mamdami said.
There is a rift in the US Left, but I think it's one Estblashiment Dems had coming for a while now. If absolutely nothing else, the rampant destruction of the country by the Trump admin has absolutely activated people in ways not seen since 9/11. And when people are active, words aren't enough anymore. They want action, to not see military roaming their streets and kidnapping US citizens. They want to see actual ways to fix the economy as these trade wars sap at their wealth.
The collorary here is that the MAGA movement is also causing a rift in the US Right. There's definitely Esablishment Republicans that do not like this situation either. And there's the fact that all this is propped on one obsese, Dementia-ridden, 79 year old man. If/when he passes, there's going to be a huge power vacuum, and none of the headrunners are ready to fill that.
If anything, the split on the Right will be worse than the split of the Left, when it eventually happens. At least the Left is having new blood to try and push that rift from the bottom up compared to the house of cards that is Trump and everyone who tried bundling under him.
You won't know this, but us living in the Czech Republic know that your "democrats" are left of center left. And for a lot of other countries that exist in the real world.
Is this proof that the "democrats" are indeed extreme left? If not, in what percentage does or does not? Do the politics of all these countries affect the "democrat" alignment in any way?
See? That is a non-argument, and it signals more about the person using it than the "democrats".
I'm not a geopolitical scientist, but I'm sure if we compose North American, South America, Europe, and Asia's countries and apply a spectrum on major policy points, you can in fact make an nigh- objective statement here.
But if you want a better lens, sure. The US is center right compared to the EU spectrum, which already congregates 20 other countries to compare to. It's likely center left libertarian when compared to many Asian countries.
I don't think the rest of my analysis is impacted by these lines drawn in the sand since the rest talks about policy and not hard definitions of spectrums.
Zohran has the largest, youngest, mandate in NYC in a very long time. The key is thats it's NYC and the place has an energy all it's own, and Zohran has that, and understands that NYC is always broke falling down, rich, and building up. Think about it, this guy just stood up, and Gotham said Hey!, you!, YES! NYC is pumped and ready to out work, out think, and out party, the entrenched, but tired and old, establishment. Lead, follow, or get out of the way(and cheer)
Make of that what you will.
Huh?
Trump v. Harris (2024) [0]
Trump: 49.8%, Harris: 48.3%
Margin: 1.5%
Mamdani v. Cuomo vs. Sliwa (2025) [1]
Mamdani: 50.4%, Cuomo: 41.6%, Sliwa: 7.1%
Margins:
Mamdani v. Cuomo: 9.8%
Mamdan v. Sliwa: 40.7%
how is that even remotely comparable?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_New_York_City_mayoral_ele...
Edit: Fixed formatting.
50.4-49.8=0.6
That’s how.
You seem to be conflating the margin between the winner and the next candidate with an overwhelming majority of people all feeling the same way. The former is a mandate, the latter is just being the least disliked.
And remember, the day after the election last year people thought Trump had gotten a majority of the popular vote. But then, once absentee ballots were counted he fell just shy of it. This morning there was still 9% of the vote uncounted in NYC, so it’s not unlikely here also Mamdani will have a plurality rather than majority.
The fact that he cleared 50% in a 3-way race is itself a mandate.
Most people would not agree with this.
To put it another way, he is leading a city where a majority or close to a majority did not support his candidacy. A mandate is when a large majority of the people you are leading supported your rise to leadership and you are no leading with their approval.
No. A majority supported his candidacy. In case you're confused about that, a "majority" is more than 50%. Mamdani received more than 50% of the vote despite something like 40-60 million dollars in attack ads making all sorts of unsubstantiated claims and outright lies about him, his policies and his background.
His victory with a majority is not in question, is it? How, exactly do elections work here? The person with the most votes wins. Full stop. Are you making some sort of claim that such is not the case. If so, where's your proof?
I'd also note that Mamdani's margin of victory (~8.5%) is right in line (with a few exceptions) with margins going back decades.[2]
Mamdani was, by far, the best candidate in the race. HIs opponents being a handsy, disgraced serial sexual harasser, a bribe taking incumbent who oversaw the most corrupt mayoral administration in decades and a media clown whose claim to fame was that he used to ride the subways at night with his gang and beat up random strangers.
As such, who should we have voted for in your opinion?
Actually, if you don't actually live in NYC, we don't care what your opinion might be. We don't tell you how to vote in your local elections, so mind your own damn business!
All that said, are you claiming that Mamdani should not be allowed to become mayor? Do you claim that his election somehow illegitimate?
Shall we, as some have suggested, strip Mamdani of his citizenship and deport him[0][1] as well?
Will that satisfy you?
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republican-calls-zohr...
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gop-lawmakers-push-strip...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election...
I felt the same about Bernie and Medicare for all. We have the money to do it, but the powerful will not let it happen.
However: that doesn’t mean we should elect politicians that won’t even try to make these things happen. It’s important to have a North Star to shoot for, to move the Overton window of what’s worth discussing and to keep an eye on what political machinations block it from happening. I will never vote for a politician who pre-compromises with an imagined opposition, because that tells me they have a different North Star than I do in the first place.
We could accept a good deal of socialism into our system and see only benefits; there are a number of things which should not be profit-motive driven at all.
The reason is two-fold: US is subsidizing the rest of the world's medical research, and US healthcare bureaucracy is among the worst in the world.
Also, are you sure the bureaucracy isn't exactly the point? If you're too sick to fight off a denial and die, they keep the money.
I think we're subsidizing Wall Street's profits with our garbage system, but the sooner people realize our system is totally failed maybe we can knock it down and do something else.
That said, I'm sure there are lots of good things Mamdani can do that are not in conflict with reality.
Mamdani is one of the powerful now.
These people are not dumb. They are just very very interested in self-dealing.
1) Cuomo. Sexpest who has been accused by many women of some pretty shitty stuff. Also a member of a multi-generational dynasty, which is not good.
2) Mayor Adams. Federally indicted by the Feds. They have a 99% conviction rate. Not because they're corrupt, but because they only go after people who have dome some really egregious, illegal shit.
3) Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Gee, who should I choose? [[said all of NYC today]]
> No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young
Stupid stuff he credibly disavowed.
I’m still blown away that after De Blasio he was the only one, when asked a foreign policy question, who said he’d put city priorities first.
This is exactly the point where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed, but common ground in so many contexts is absent.
I hope that we can put ourselves back together. We've seen the consequences this year of its lack.
Sure. Broadly. But there is one correct answer a mayoral candidate could give on such an issue, and it’s the one Mamdani gave.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.
It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.
It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-war/humanity-hanging...
Maybe guns or butter is a false dichotomy. Or perhaps the even tougher lesson: a country with an information economy ends up with neither.
Eric Adams: Lebanon 2024, Israel 2023, Quatar 2022
Bill de Blasio: Israel 2015
What should not happen obviously does.
We are all receptive of Jewish people. We are not receptive of our country, who cut off food benefits, cut people's flights, cut people's medical insurance subsidies, funding and enabling a state where of the native born population, only Jewish people get to vote and have autonomy, and other non-Jewish ethnicities live under the control of a state they have no rights in purely because of their ethnicity. No one supports that part
I think that's a pretty good reason for them to exist even today. We don't need the market competing to get people to drink more.
Only if you think the government should be telling people what to buy and what not to buy. I personally find that highly objectionable, particularly given the outsized power of primary voters in most places.
> Government run grocery stores are middle of the road?
The only people I see complaining about them are religious teetotalers.
The prices are usually higher than private stores, the merchandising is worse, the selection is usually bad, and they're generally just a miserable shopping experience. Compare them to a nice wine and liquor store in states where those are allowed and the difference is quite apparent. They also never have staff that know anything about the products which is just a shitty DMV like experience.
Prices are pretty in line with market rates. The selection is really pretty good. The shopping experience is the same as any other store (what makes a shopping experience "miserable?")
> Compare them to a nice wine
In Idaho, wine is allowed to be sold in grocery stores and specialty shops. The liquor stores are for hard beverages.
> They also never have staff that know anything about the products
Staff seems just fine with the products. But again, don't see why that's important in general.
> just a shitty DMV like experience.
I don't really know what you mean by this. You go in, find the booze you like, pay for it at the register, or ask a clerk a question if you have one (Do you have a lot of questions purchasing alcohol? Every time?) If you want a more expensive experience you can go to a wine shop in Idaho and let someone blow smoke up your ass about the notes.
Look, Idaho might just be particularly good at running a booze shop, but I doubt it. It may be that because Idaho only has liquor stores for hard alcoholic beverages it's made for a better experience all around. It certainly doesn't suffer from selection, knowledge, or experience problems. I think the only issue you might take is that it's just sorted shelves of alcohol with little flashy theming.
I think maybe you and I have different definitions for the word "mainstream". To me it has nothing to do with popularity and everything to do with what is normal and everyday.
The staff are treated and paid well, the stores are well stocked and clean, and I pay tax free on some of the lowest prices in the country.
Why shouldn’t society recoup some of those costs from the users? And why should society subsidize those costs?
It’s interesting that it was politically acceptable to charge tobacco users more for health insurance, but not politically acceptable to charge alcohol users more for health insurance.
Allowing private business isn't a subsidy.
> Why shouldn’t society recoup some of those costs from the users?
That's what the taxes are for.
> That's what the taxes are for.
Taxes are not (should not be) for subsidizing behavior that results in a loss for society.
New Hampshire liquor stores contribute over $150MM to community programs a year. [0]. They had an annual profit of $170MM in FY2023.
Also, New Hampshire does not have sales tax on certain goods and services. Hotel rooms and car rentals, for example, do have sales tax. And apparently, alcohol sold at the state alcohol stores.
https://www.revenue.nh.gov/taxes-glance/meals-rooms-rentals-...
I have to disagree. In a very real sense, the residents of a political entity are the stakeholders within that political boundary and, at least in a democratic (small 'd') society, those stakeholders are, in fact, the owner/shareholders of that political entity.
That's neither very profound nor much of an intellectual stretch. Although, apparently you disagree. Why is that?
That still doesn’t mean it makes sense to categorize government income as “profit” (for the purposes of this discussion trying to discern whether or not NH taxes alcohol).
Governments and businesses have (or are supposed to have) different priorities, and are (theoretically) structured so that in exchange for the government being given a monopoly on violence for those who don’t pay, the government (ideally) is working towards providing services that benefit all of society, for the long term.
The New Hampshire government’s website linked above even states:
> $146m Annual Contribution To The General Fund
What difference does it make if the tax is not separated out like alcohol taxes in most other states? The bottom line is New Hampshire could be selling alcohol for less, but it chooses not to in order to use the extra money to fund government services. That is a tax.
Nope. It's a dividend for the shareholders.
As we're only considering children being born, the health effects of alcohol while pregnant are known, (aka fetal alcohol syndrome) but since they're known, they can be dismissed if we assume pregnant mothers aren't drinking. The other thing we can discount is the long term health effects of alcohol consumption. Yes there are health ramifications, but as long as people are able to create healthy babies, what happens later on in life is less relevant to the question of making babies, which civilization needs in order to continue.
If this is alluding to unplanned pregnancies, that is almost unheard of nowadays due to access to IUDs/morning after pill/abortion.
Whether or not alcohol, or specifically hard alcohol, plays a material role in establishing relationships that otherwise would not happen is difficult to discern, but I don't see why an alcohol tax (or even just higher liquor taxes) would dissuade people. It only takes a few drinks to become "buzzed", so any tax would only be material to heavy drinkers.
I don't see how a government run liquor store limits abuse, and most seem to offer the same products as any other store (does it really make a difference above a certain proof?). And many states limit hours that alcohol is sold without having government run stores.
As far state run liquor stores dissuading alcoholism, Scandinavian countries state-run their liquor stores for that expressed reason. Their hours are intentionally bad, the products expensive and small. No 1.75 L handles of 80 proof vodka to be found. It's mostly effective, but it's also not New England where if you just drive for an hour or two, you can hit multiple states and jurisdictions with different blue laws, limiting the effectiveness of state run stores.
What state run stores, ostensibly force, is better adherence with the law. The corner shop where you've gone to for twenty years and are friends with the owner, is totally just gonna give you beer Sunday morning when it's illegal to do so, but record it in the system on Monday. A bit harder to do in a state run store with more oversight. Also, it's harder to import prohibited kinds of alcohol with said. oversight vs a privately run store. As with any law though, it's not 100% effective, but that's not a reason to not have a law.
Mamdani’s proposed grocery stores aren’t a monopoly. Whether they’re a good idea remains to be seen, but they’d be competing against privately owned grocery stores. As I understand them, they’re mostly intended for areas without a local grocery store (food deserts), which seems like a reasonable thing to explore.
Ultimately only the bougie grocery stores remain in rich neighborhoods and now you have to really hope that you can continue funding those state-run stores or you just made the food desert problem a whole lot worse.
The actual MSRP from PA wine and liquor stores is very competitive, since it's one of the largest single buyers of alcohol. Selection could be better though.
>"In FY2024, total income before transfers was $144.7 million with the total net profit transfer of $140.0 million. Of the $140.0 million, the Liquor Commission transferred $122.0 million to the General Fund"[1]
[1] https://gov.liquorandwineoutlets.com/wp-content/uploads/2025...
NYC has a $6B cop budget. They even have subs. Yet nobody worries about that. A grocery store could be ran at a deficit. More than likely it will be neutral or will turn a slight profit.
Based on what exactly, just your opinion? Obviously you know nothing about the grocery business which is a notoriously low-margin business, between 1-3%. The only way that large grocers like Krogers and Albertsons are profitable is purely based on volume. You also realize that groceries are perishable items right? You also realize these are labor and energy inensive operations right? And that there's tons of competition? And of course shrinkage. There is zero chance that it would operate at a profit or break even. By the way it's been tried before look up Baldwin, Florida or Erie, Kansas for examples of city-run grocery failures. There are others as well.
Lastly, nothing about any of this in any way comparable to NYPD as a budgetary item. Comparing retail food to public safety is just really bizarre.
If they wanted to accommodate that shortfall, then that translates to a $150 yearly tax burden per person. They instead chose to shutter the store.
The stores lost money in both cities, but in the process baldwin sold over $1M in produce breaking even at least once.
> There is zero chance that it would operate at a profit or break even.
The Baldwin example shows that breaking even is definitely possible. And for a city with the population density of NY, it's probably easier to pull off. It's certainly easier to support these stores if there's a shortfall.
> Lastly, nothing about any of this in any way comparable to NYPD as a budgetary item. Comparing retail food to public safety is just really bizarre.
But it is. The NYPD is simply overfunded. They can buy toys and tanks while paying the cops to catch people jumping turnstiles and play candy crush.
A pretty small fraction of the NYPD budget could cover shortfalls. That's why it's brought up. These grocery stores, even if they never turn a profit, won't be costing the city $100M, or $10M. They likely won't even shortfall to $1M. For a city with a budget of billions, adding 1M in is really just a drop in bucket.
And in the process, such a grocery store will help far more people than the average NYPD cop does.
This. A city with not just a budget of "billions" but of USD$116 billion[0].
Even if each of the five pilot stores required USD$1 million in subsidies, that's 0.0000431% of the city budget or USD$0.61 per NY resident. We're definitely going bankrupt over that right?
And if it results in the poorest NYers getting access to cheaper, healthier food, that's good for business (healthier people work more), education (healthier people learn better), healthcare (healthier people consume less healthcare), quality of life (reasonably priced healthy food allows folks to live better lives) and a host of other benefits.
As a NYC resident, I'm happy to give the poorest folks in the city $0.61 a year or even $2.00 a year. Isn't $0.61 a reasonable price to pay for making the lives of thousands of your neighbors demonstrably better?
[0] https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/06/30/nyc-council-passes-11...
The Mamdani plan is to put in stores where no stores exist. That's just a city ran store. Something that used to be pretty common in the US.
That is because that is the viable model in those areas to actually run a store without having your staff egregiously injured/assaulted and not have everything not nailed down stolen.
This ends up getting reflected also in higher prices of foods in those areas, to reflect the cost and lower supply of those willing to take those measures. So people will call it a 'food desert' -- not because you can't get food there (though it mostly sucks and is shelf stable stuff) but because nothing there resembling a walk-around middle-class grocery store exists.
Failing to take those measures, or taking the measures and not raising prices enough to cover the costs, will likely end up in the state losing money, that is, they will be forced to seize the capital of private citizens to fund the state's commercial offerings.
What you are describing is a payday lending building.
Communism only happens after a revolution overthrowing the current government and replacing the entire economy with the state overseeing it. Note the word entire.
Socialism is when you have the public own entire industries. For example, how the oil industry in Norway is owned by the state.
Having the government do something or own a business is neither communism nor socialism. It's simply a state owned thing. It's not, for example, socialist for the government to have a parks department.
A city ran store is not the city owning the means of production. There will still be private stores throughout NYC. The areas where these stores are being targeted are where those private stores have chosen not to deploy.
Communism isn't "everything I didn't like"
Progressive ideas would be price controls on groceries to curb inflation, or seizing the means of production by making a major stake in a major food chain.
(side note: I think it's hilarious that Trump is doing this with Intel and potentially Tiktok and few have labeled it as such).
Also, Mamdani's policies are incredibly controversial, that's why it's such big news. Lots of people predicting that Mamdani's criminal policies, economic policies, and lack of experienced staffers will lead the city to dark days.
You also think New York can't find someone that's at least as competent as someone in a multigenerational dynasty?
But yes, someone with connections is going to be more operationally effective than someone without them. If the leader isn't themselves well connected, they should at least have close advisors who do.
Aristocracies are more stable but less efficient. That creates an incentive for corruption when growth inevitably stalls. Which leads to catastrophic instability.
Lords being unconcerned with—and constrained by—wealth characterises all (EDIT: none of the) non-market societies that I know of. In part because basic economics constrains the society as a whole, even if they’re ignorant of its principles.
> only that the incentive for corruption is absent
What historic civilisation are you thinking of?
"Corruption is the dishonest, fraudulent, or criminal use of entrusted authority or power for personal gain or other unlawful or unethical benefits."[2]
Every single aristocracy absolutely fits those definitions. The norm in every aristocracy is to disregard the law in favor of what benefits those in power and to apply the law unequally depending on the desires of rulers.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/corrupti...
You are demand better of your government than "the blatant corruption you've learned to live with."
I'm not sure NYC knows what it is getting into with this guy, but yeah, the alternatives were lousy. Sliwa? The whole Guardian Angels thing was one hell of a marketing job, I'll say that. Does anyone really believe a bunch of former gang thugs with some martial arts training accomplished very much?
The Cuomo family is corrupt to the core. Terrible for NY State.
Good luck, NYC. You're gonna need it!
Which policies are "incredibly controversial?" And be specific.
Here'a a direct link to his platform for your reference"
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
No rush. I'll wait.
There are clearly policies on that page that break from the NYC status quo (like freezing the rent). Perhaps you are interested in explaining to us why you think these are economically sound ideas, rather than insisting they aren't controversial?
The platform page points out how the status quo was recently broken: "Eric Adams has taken every opportunity to squeeze tenants, with his hand-picked appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board jacking up rents on stabilized apartments by 12.6% (and counting)–the most since a Republican ran City Hall."
Sure sounds like Adams made a controversial change to the status quo to me.
The position is "As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants".
I read that as want to return to status quo ante Adams.
You mean like the rent freeze[0] in 2020/2021 (and apparently in 2014-2016[1], although I don't recall that and am too lazy to check my old leases) on the very same apartments that Mamdani is proposing the same?
>I don't feel that you're going to get a lot of engagement with this attitude. It doesn't come off like a good-faith effort to have an honest intellectual conversation, which is what this forum is about.
Really? Funny that. As a resident of NYC, I reviewed the policies proposed by Mamdani and none of them seem all that controversial (or even all that much in the way of veering from the status quo). I will say that the whole public grocery stores seems a little over the top, but market forces haven't eliminated food deserts in many lower income neighborhoods. As such, why is it bad to try such a thing?
GP called Mamdani's policy proposals "incredibly controversial." I haven't seen even one such policy. As such, I asked for an example of such a "controversial" policy to help me understand where GP was coming from and provided a comprehensive list of Mamdani's policy proposals as an aid to identifying such policies.
I explicitly asked for specific proposals so we could discuss why (or why not) they might be "controversial."
How is that a bad "attitude"?
[0] https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2025/07/fact-sheet...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45819654
Edit: Fixed prose.
If you don't think any of those policies are contentious, you are living in a bubble and greatly disconnected from huge portions of the population.
The 1990s when NYPD cops Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Kenneth Boss shot Amadou Diallo? When NYPD cop Justin Volpe sodomized Abner Louima with a broken broom handle? When NYPD cop Francis X. Livoti choked Anthony Baez for accidentally hitting a police car with a football?
If you don't think the history of being hard on crime is contentious, you are living in a bubble and greatly disconnected from huge portions of the population.
Other places have free public transport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport). How has that threatened the economic viability and safety of those places?
And isn't it funny how the people who complain the most about free public transport have a large overlap with the people who didn't want congestion charges but instead wanted free access to city streets for their multi-ton private vehicles?
How could city owned grocery stores threaten the economic viability and safety of NYC? The only way that makes sense to me is if the economics of NYC depended on having a working class which is always on the edge of food insecurity. Were that the case, the economics structure of NYC must change, yes?
Since homeless shelters threaten the economic viability of hotels and rental companies, and libraries threaten the economic viability of bookstores, I suppose we should get rid of those too.
I do. And today is light years better than it was in the 90s. In fact, there were crack dealers on my corner in the 90s. They're not there any more. Or on 95th street and Amsterdam.
And there aren't any hookers on 90th street and Broadway or 58th and Sixth like there were in the 80s.
And I didn't know Verdi Park was called "Verdi Park" back then either. I just thought they called it "needle park" because it was kind of shaped like a needle. Silly me.
Or the side streets between 38th and 42nd streets from 10th Avenue to the West Side Highway literally covered in hundreds/thousands of used condoms every morning
And the 80s were much, much worse than the 90s. And don't even get me started on the 1970s, when there were street gangs every few blocks.
Oh, and back then (not much change AFAICT), the cops were just the biggest and best-armed gang.
Oh, I'm sorry haven't you lived in NYC for nearly 60 years too?
Soft on crime because Mamdani wants to send non-cops to help people having mental episodes? Soft on crime because he wants to enforce the law and close Rikers?
Free buses? Really? that's not exactly going to break the bank. And even so, the MTA needs to approve that -- and the MTA is controlled by the Governor, not the Mayor.
Five grocery stores in areas which aren't served by private ones? How exactly is that going to threaten[0] (perhaps USD$10 million to acquire space and set them all up, then presumably it can cover its costs from, you know, selling groceries -- or even USD$2.5 million in subsidies) the economic viability of NYC which has a budget of USD$116 Billion[1]?
Crime is down at levels not seen since the early 1960s (before I was born -- that's relevant because I've lived in, with the exception of a year here, six months, three months elsewhere, etc. in NYC my whole life) and crime is at its lowest in all that time. Free buses are a few tens of millions and a few grocery stores are chump change[2] in NYC.
>If you don't think any of those policies are contentious, you are living in a bubble and greatly disconnected from huge portions of the population.
I take issue with that characterization. How long have you lived in NYC?
[0] https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/cost-to-open-a-sup...
[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/06/30/nyc-council-passes-11...
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chump%20change
Edit: Fixed prose/punctuation.
which policies?
I really don't know what you're talking about.
I read through his platform[0] and I don't see anything that's "soft" on crime.
Please do enlighten me as I'm apparently quite confused.
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7ejjSZWWIAcxfcWnkYaqvnj...
Because they're undemocratic.
Concentrating political capital within a family means raises barriers to entry. People with new -- possibly better -- ideas don't get a meaningful chance to see those ideas implemented.
These sorts of setups destroy the idea that politics and elections can be a meritocracy, but instead are determined by birthright. You end up with aristocracies populated by the extended family, friends, and business partners of the family in power.
You also get stagnation. You're less likely to see other points of view represented in the political process, and that affects outcomes.
A dynasty is only undemocratic if people aren't voting for them. If they are winning elections, it's still a democracy.
Also not sure what value your comment has. Interpret things charitably. Your "gotcha" is not at all that.
That's not true at all. He is not even "middle of the road" in the Democratic party.
Rent control isn't middle of the road, it's 100% socialist. Same thing with city run grocery stores. He also wants to defund the police while replacing them with community outreach people, as well as raising the minimum wage to $30 in 5 years which is absolutely wild. None of this is middle of the road in any way, shape, or form.
So he already backtracked on a core election promise even before he got elected? Doesn’t bode well for his supporters expectations going forward.
That's actually not true. The rent freeze is for rent stabilized[0] apartments. Rent control[1] is a different program and is tiny in comparison.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation_in_New_York#Re...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation_in_New_York#Re...
A medium fries is over $4 before taxes… over $1 more expensive than the rest of the country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44968997
Same with Chipotle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45762671
Who pays the profits? Like tariffs, the consumer. You pay for these billions in annual profits.
What you really need to look at is the cost of labor for a random McDonald's franchisee.
Study: California's $20 fast-food minimum wage improves pay at small cost to consumers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806608 - May 2025
https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2025/02/27/uc-berk...
https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/brief/effects-of-the-...
If the profit percentage hasn’t increased, “record profits” is meaningless drivel that just means it kept up with inflation.
Regardless, the fries cost what the local market can bear, not what they "want" to charge for them.
Reduced employment by 3% but otherwise fine, yeah.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
A nationwide $30 minimum wage would have a significantly higher impact (most places have lower wages than California and $30 is more than $20).
It's fine to argue it's a good tradeoff; I just want advocates to admit there is a tradeoff.
I'm almost 50 and the last president we ever saw that was even remotely towards the left was in office when I was born.
Actually could not believe this, so had to look it up. I find this wild.
The weirdest part of the transition was the fear mongering about consequences. This despite the reality that most states don’t have state-run liquor stores.
I’ve never lived in a state where state-run liquor stores weren’t worse than what you had in states without them.
I did all my groceries in nyc via Amazon fresh for the last two years because of this.
But TBH I don't think the grocery deserts he's looking to service are going to be anywhere near where the average HN user lives.
Of all of his policies, I actually don't really care if he wants to try to put some grocery stores in grocery deserts. It probably won't work, but whatever.
Most (not all) Liquor / Wine sales are somewhat monopolized by the state but it’s a remnant from prohibition and nobody except the people getting their palms greased by the system likes it.
The state shops themselves aren’t all that horrible IMO but they’re nothing to write home about either. That being said It’s pretty hard to screw up liquor sales when you’re the only game in town.
Only in the last decade or so has some competition been allowed.
Great, then "socialism" doesn't have to be the scary word that it is made out to be in the US! We have at least 17 socialist states already.[1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...
> Most people hate it.
Not exactly an endorsement. If your pitch is that socialism means more places work like the liquor stores, you'll be creating a lot of capitalists.
Using the market is well and fine, but if it for some reason does not work it's the government's job to find a solution which works. Think about how things are handled in emergencies. The neutral thing is to find a solution, not be married to some ideological ball and chain saying that THAT particular necessity must be solved in one particular way no matter what.
When that is said I don't live in NYC, idk how the food desert situation is there. But I have heard enough stories from credible sources that I would be surprised if it's all made up.
Housing as mentioned above. There was also a time the railway was a obvious public responsibility. Similarly for airlines (Scandinavian Airlines, British Airways). Telephone companies(British Telecom, Telenor), mail (Royal Mail), gas (Gas Act 1948), iron and steel (Iron and Steel Act 1967), and electric production ( Electricity Act 1947).
If anything it is rather opposite, the moment something is privatised it's hard to get it under public control again. But even if you don't agree with that it should certainly be clear that removing something from the public sector is both possible and has happened to a large degree.
(McDonald’s is still $17 an hour in Billings.)
Lots of states have state-run liquor stores, even super conservative ones.
It’s a smaller delta than you think.
Anyone who has shopped a state run vs regular liquor store knows how much worse the gov version is unless your goal is higher prices, worse service, and worse selection.
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wa...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/minimum-wage-york-2024-live-1...
Edit: If the system of “we make asset prices go up while labor prices are inflated away” gets to the point where a living wage is unobtainable (we are here), we can change the system. The name is irrelevant, it’s fundamentally “what are you optimizing for?”
This happens eventually (wage increases) due to global structural demographic working age population compression, the argument is really time horizon if we help people live better lives with dignity now vs years from now as labor supply declines.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wa...
You cannot with a straight face claim bringing it to $60 has anything to do with inflation when the value it would need is right in that article.
https://www.epi.org/blog/a-30-by-2030-minimum-wage-in-new-yo...
> With the FBC cost data we can estimate a living wage that would allow workers to support their families. Table 1 shows that the living wage in 2025 is already above $30 an hour in Manhattan ($33.89), Queens ($31.31), and Staten Island ($30.68). While Brooklyn and The Bronx do not exceed this threshold, the costs facing these families will almost certainly continue to rise between today and 2030. These figures make it clear that discussions of a $30 minimum wage in New York City are not superfluous—they reflect the very real needs of working people throughout the city.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/guy-shared-just-high-min...
> Someone Calculated What The Minimum Wage Should Be Today Compared To The '70s In Order To Afford A Home
> Now, Chris's video isn't to suggest that minimum wage, at any point in its history, allowed people to buy homes outright. Rather, he told BuzzFeed, he wanted to highlight the ways in which "wages have decoupled from cost of living, housing prices, and broader economic growth over the last few decades."
> "The original purpose of the minimum wage was to ensure that even low-wage workers could participate meaningfully in the economy. Not just survive, but live with dignity," he said.
I'm not against raising minimum wage, but economics is a very complex thing and changes like that need to be approached carefully.
Ask Seattle how well that turned out
That's some editorializing
The mayor also capped non police crisis response teams to 24 people. Total. For the city. 24.
Seattle has done everything except defund the police, lol
Look, Mamdani ran a good campaign, and if I was an NYC voter (I am not) I'd probably vote for him out of the options provided.
However, this just is not true. Many of his policies are neither "common sense" nor "middle of the road". Especially not on education and dealing with the homeless and public transit. And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
If you're talking about the "globalize the intifada" comment, he actually never even said that, but a whole lot of people (you among them, it seems like?) have been brainwashed into thinking he did through political maneuvering.
The root of that whole drummed up controversy was him refusing to blanket condemn the phrase when media people (never attributing it as something he himself had said) kept asking him to.
And he was always very clear what his reasons for that were, which were extremely reasonable to anyone who isn't a kneejerk ultra zionist.
He said he wanted to close down Rikers Island, right in the middle of the debates [2]. He said that prisons are unnecessary [3]. He said he wants to empty jails [4-6]. His comments on crime and policing, in general, are quite extreme. I could set literally every other topic to the side, and this would be a voting issue for me.
These are his words. I'm not taking them out of context or reinterpreting them. About the only response to this stuff a reasonable person can muster is "he doesn't believe that now". Yeah, OK. I guess we'll find out...
[1a] "NO to fake cuts - defund the police." https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1277414510131916801
[1b] more on his historical comments on defunding: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/mamdani-defund-p...
[1c] "dismantle" the police (in this case, the Vice squad): https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1336087694636707841
[2] "Yes, we have to close Riker's island" https://www.facebook.com/reel/1380642053476909
[3] prisons unnecessary: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/out-of-touch-ma...
[4] "the goal must be to abolish [prisons]" (plus multiple other variations on that theme) https://x.com/peterjhasson/status/1937682021276410317
[5] "The entire carceral system is an unreformable public health hazard. Defund & dismantle." https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1328828240757215234
[6] "what purpose do [prisons] serve?" https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1945929553274196188
[2-6] indicate that our current prison system is punitive and does nothing in the way of rehabilitation or reform. No, he will not close every prison. Yes, in an ideal world we would not need hundreds of prisons full to the brim because we would actually rehabilitate and release people. This is hardly a fringe opinion and it is in fact a very common criticism of our prison system. Interpreting these statements as "he is just going to stop prisons and let all the violent criminals out in one go!!!" with no further though IS reinterpreting his words uncharitably because obviously that would be stupid.
Regarding prisons, again, he is explicitly talking about closing down prisons. He has moderated his rhetoric more recently on this issue, but no, your interpretation of the subject is not what he's saying here, and it clearly isn't what he means, even today.
He has a long history on these topics. I'm not misinterpreting his comments.
> We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.
> What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.
> But your deal with @NYCMayor uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat.
> NO to fake cuts - defund the police.
The only way you can say this doesn't mean "defund the police" is by re-defining his words using Orwellian double-speak ("he doesn't really mean defund"), and then, when you get to the last line, ignore the part where he explicitly tells you not to do that. No fake cuts! Defund!
It seems like common sense to hear "cityfolk pay taxes, buses are paid for by taxpayers. Therefore, bus rides should be free for cityfolk". There's a lot more to it, but most voters are not going to read the 50 page proposal that Mamdami would need to submit to the govenor to get the wheels rolling.
I think that's enough for it to fall under "common sense". Policy you can explain in 3 sentences or less. Homeless people need help, not to be arrested. Invest in an organization who makes sure that these people get help so they don't stay on the streets.
(I can't find his education policy on a quick skim of the website and plan).
Free buses and free child care are not remotely common policies in the US. Ditto for govt-run grocery stores. And freezing rent for controlled units.
While not common, free buses do exist throughout the US and Europe.
Free childcare is uncommon. IDK where that actually exists.
Government run stores is actually very common. Many states run the liquor stores. A few cities have government run grocery stores.
Freezing the rent on rent controlled buildings isn't common but rent control itself it quite uncommon. It's probably the easiest for Mamdani to accomplish.
As for universal free childcare, I'm aware of it's existence in a number of places in Germany (Berlin, in particular), driven by having been an extremely popular public benefit in East Germany.
Rent control is increasing popular and common in liberal areas (which NYC is)
It's disgusting they're allowed to vilify him so much without any accountability.
The thing that annoys me the most is that by scapegoating Khan they avoid fixing the problems that are the responsibility of others. Like knife crime - the tories cut 1/3 of the police force, crime went up in London but also in the rest of the country but the papers are all lets slag Kahn for it which is jolly fun I guess but doesn't stop the stabbings and phone snatchings in a way that the central government which controls the laws and budgets could do.
Mamdani seems like a nice guy but some of his policies seem a bit bonkers - state owned retail outlets and the like.
Which means the most prices can be lowered is 2%.
Which means the problem in food deserts is the customers are too poor.
Which means the solution is giving poor people money.
But that is not a winning political position, so we have all these nonsense proposals.
For people who live near one of those stores and can afford to shop competitively. In many urban environments, the competition is smaller shops or places which know you aren’t going to spend an hour driving elsewhere.
I live in DC, and we have a Safeway near us which often charged 2-3 TIMES what Costco charged. Once a second market opened in our neighborhood, just like magic the prices at Safeway came down.
The corner market was basically never competitive on prices because it’s tiny and carries the small sized products which always work out to a higher cost.
I'm kind of curious what is different about the US environment that makes this the case. Most large European cities have supermarkets (national chains) all over the place. To the point that it gets a bit silly; I've got about five Tescos in easy walking distance, which have the same prices as other Tescos (one is a Tesco Metro, which is slightly more expensive).
Every time I’ve been in Europe I keep asking why we can’t have those markets, too. Trying to minimize time spent out of our cars and avoid contact with our neighbors has had a really big price.
And yet Aldi's prices in the states are more than 2% below Albertson's. Almost like there actually is more room for improvement?
That is the underlying story, is that fewer Americans can afford the full service grocer (or maybe don't want to patronize due to smaller household sizes and less cooking). Also, Aldi has successfully fended off unions, which are mostly a thing legacy grocers like Albertsons and Kroger have to deal with.
And yet, plenty to spend billions on share buybacks.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/kroger-albert...
Otherwise, it would be a charity.
> Kroger said it would repurchase $7.5 billion of its shares after a more than two-year pause, with $5 billion of that to be repurchased in an accelerated fashion — the same sum that Kroger estimated Wednesday it has spent to lowering prices over the past 21 years.
How anyone can complain about a 2% profit margin, especially on a forum where workers earn high salaries because they work for businesses with 20%+ profit margins, is beyond me. Expecting every organization to be a charity seems a bit immature.
I'd very much rather be in the business of selling $100B at 2% profit margin than selling $100k at 50% profit margin. Same for health insurers - they have enormous volume. Low-margin isn't a great defense, especially as it's a gameable metric; you can reduce margins in all sorts of ways.
Like, say, spending some on private jets. https://nbaa.org/membership/member-profiles/the-kroger-co/
How is this relevant? A business’s goal is to earn a return for shareholders. A business also needs sufficient profit margin to weather volatility.
It is quite evident that with current technology, the business of retailing groceries, and retail in general needs about a 2% profit margin to survive long term, and earn a sufficient return to be worth investing in. Same for insurance.
Obviously, this is an objectively low amount of profit margin, given that 0% is a charity. So again, how can one complain about a business earning too much money when there exists no competitor that can deliver these goods at a lower profit margin?
The argument is in the same vein of there is no labor shortage, just a shortage of buyers able and willing to pay enough.
Please show me where any plan like that is published. And specifically which neighborhoods that every white person will pay more taxes. The actuarials say I should live another 25 years or so. I'll wait.
Or are you referring to the proposed 2% increase in income taxes for folks making over USD$1,000,000/annum, which has exactly zero to do with location (other than NYC as a whole)?
Such an increase, while suggested by Mamdani, is not within the purview of the mayor of NYC to implement. Rather, any tax increase must be passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor. The most NYC's mayor can do is ask the state.
Are you that uninformed? Do you even live in NY State?
From https://nypost.com/2025/06/27/us-news/socialist-nyc-mayoral-...
If it was just about wealth, why bring race into it?
The property tax system is unbalanced because assessment levels are
artificially capped, so homeowners in expensive neighborhoods pay less than
their fair share.
As for "richer and whiter" neighborhoods, the median income for "white" folks is ~$108,000 and everyone else is 35-51% less[0]. As such, given the income breakdowns, "whiter" neighborhoods are richer neighborhoods.
Or are you arguing that more expensive properties should have a lower tax rate because more "white" people live there?
What's more you (and the NY Post, that racist rag) take a single word and completely ignore the actual intent of the proposal, which like pretty much every other tax, isn't set by the mayor, but by the state legislature and the governor.
Thanks for repeating white supremacist talking points. If I need more, I know where to find them.
[0] https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/new-york-ny-median-househ...
Or are you making that claim that those neighborhoods should only have "white" people?
As much as I've given you the benefit of the doubt, it's pretty clear you're not posting in good faith in any of the multiple interactions we've had in this specific discussion. I'm done.
If it's just about wealth, then why did what I linked to bring up race at all? Why isn't it just "richer neighborhoods"?
That's true. There are a couple of Costcos, but since I don't own a car (like most New Yorkers) it's not all that useful.
And supermarkets in NYC (in car-centric places some NYC supermarkets are smaller than gas station convenience stores) are definitely more expensive than supermarkets outside NYC.
What's more, the "food deserts" that Mamdani's proposal is trying to address don't have any supermarkets and folks are forced to take the bus or the subway to shop for groceries. I'd also note that most subway stations do not have elevators, making it much more difficult to shop for any length of time, especially for older, less mobile folks.
People probably thought the UK's state-owned bank was a bit bonkers at the time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank) but it _worked_; it forced private banks to expand access and to modernise. And then eventually it couldn't compete. But it's hard to consider it as anything other than a success.
(This is all assuming that NYC supermarkets have a competition problem in the first place, though. Never been to NYC, so wouldn't know.)
Eric Adams born 1960
Andrew Cuomo born 1957
Curtis Sliwa born 1954
Mamdani born 1991
On policing, on New York's relationship to Israel, on public transit, the so-called 'mainstream' is actually 'the average view of people over 60'.
[0]: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/explorer/cities/NYC?c...
1. It hasn't worked like this when they elected Trump for the second time. Back then Kamala should have been the only valid candidate, according to this thinking.
2. Mamdani got 1,036,051 votes and Cuomo got 854,995. This is not exactly "all of NYC" as you imply.
I'd also call out October 17, 2025 : Zohran Mamdani Refuses To Share Plan For Making Rich Richer https://theonion.com/zohran-mamdani-refuses-to-share-plan-fo...
For all I dislike him, Trump essentially squandered the political capital he had on things that are shiny, motivated by ego, and created clickbaity headlines that single out small subsets of the American populous. He could have done far far worse and less reversible things to America. We’re now at the start of the end of his presidency, with focus first turning to midterms and then his replacement.
I don’t expect Mamdani to do much better with his political capital.
I agree with most of his goals but have serious doubts about the viability of the methods. We’ll see.
My biggest doubts are around the idea of price controls, which almost always lead to perverse incentives. The economy finds a way to sneak in an effective price increase via other means. Either that or you create a landed gentry of sorts, or a “landed rentry” for rent control. You get a class of beneficiaries locked into place and nobody else can get in.
I do like seeing different ideas get tried. I like experiments, and I think we should have more of them. The endless tape loop of 1980s-1990s Reagan/Clinton politics is clearly not addressing some glaring problems.
And I do think he’s adherent to a fairly narrowly defined set of left wing principles and ideologies.
Like you, I agree there’s no harm in trying new things because there’s always what to learn. But I don’t exactly expect them to go well. Hope I’m wrong though and if nothing else it’s becoming incredibly clear we need a new generation of leaders in this country. To end this loop, like you said.
DeBlasio froze rent for rent-stabilized units for 3 years straight. Literally everything Mamdani campaigned on is entirely possible and funding straightforward.
Not easy, but emminently doable.
Of course he’d also pro density and new construction, which would actually help.
In contrast to how he suggested it.
Despite the widespread (and why would folks who don't live in NYC and shouldn't really care about local elections except as they repeat flat wrong assertions about Mamdani and his proposed policies) incorrect framing, in NYC (which is what we're talking about here), rent control is a specific program governed by a specific set of laws. Rent stabilization is a different specific program governed by a different set of laws.
While there are only ~24,000 rent controlled units, there are ~1,000,000 rent stabilized units.
The latter is what's affected by Mamdani's proposal. This isn't new either. Rent stabilization in pretty much its current form has existed for more than 40 years and rent control much, much longer.
So this isn't some new policy that "commie jihadi" is proposing. And freezes on rent stabilized units have been done repeatedly, the last time in 2020/2021.
None of that is new or even mildly controversial.
Sources:
My lease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation_in_New_York
https://www.nyc.gov/site/mayorspeu/programs/rent-stabilizati...
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/rent-reg...
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/faqs/...
Like, they mightn't have won, but surely a boring establishment candidate would at least have beat Cuomo.
> In September 2024, a series of investigations into Adams's administration emerged. Adams was indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams pleaded not guilty to the charges. He alleged that the charges were retaliation for opposing the Biden administration's handling of the migrant crisis. In February 2025, the Department of Justice in the Donald Trump administration instructed federal prosecutors to drop charges against Adams. Judge Dale Ho dismissed the case against Adams on April 2, 2025
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart...
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).
"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."
- Vienna, Austria: About 60% of residents live in city-subsidized or cooperatively owned housing
- Berlin, Germany: Rent control has been mixed, varies by neighborhood, but seen as working
- Singapore: Not rent control in the classic sense, but government-built housing
- Montreal, Canada: Rent control applies mainly to existing tenant
Not all perfect. There are others. It can work.
“it can work” in some way of course. People are surprisingly adaptable to living in semi-dysfunctional environments. But it reality the only thing that truly works is building a lot of housing.
Rent control isn't the cause of that, though, it's lack of housing supply to meet demand. If there was no rent control, competition would be just as fierce, and prices still high.
Some genuinely lovely so-called “rust-belt” cities in the US have enjoyed a cheap housing renaissance on the back of historical population decline that is driving population increase now.
Yes, it's possible to increase rent, but only if the surrounding areas prices have increased, and even then the renter has to agree or it otherwise goes to court and the court tends to not side with landlords.
> and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate
Yes and no. Most housing in Tokyo is apartment complexes and/or condos, which do not depreciate very much (and in fact in the past few years have appreciated by ~30%). Standalone houses depreciate, but the land appreciates. That leads to new construction for those properties, which often then turn into apartment complexes.
Basically, it's a matter of mostly becoming more dense over time, while also restricting price increases of rents.
It's a much more conformist, homogenized culture so there's less resistance in implementing policy on general.
Also, housing isn't an "asset" the way it is in the US. You simply don't place as much value on your house over there, so there's less resistance to renovating or outright demolishing houses every few decades. Americans would instead see money going down the drain.
Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.
If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect
The near-term effect will be a spike in market rates. If Mamdani delivers on new supply, rents should broadly flatten in real terms.
We need a change. We don't need to do rent freezes in a vacuum. Coupled with the right policy supports they can definitely work, and Mamdani's proposed freezes are limited in scope. He is freezing rents only for select controlled units, last I checked.
Before you go spreading the bs propaganda, consider what your fellow citizens actually need to survive and whether or not you want to be viewed as being on the side of a few billionaires or on the side of the vast population that is increasingly becoming impoverished.
2. New york city has laws making it so you can only increase rent by a small fraction of the investment for renovation taking a large amount of units off the market as its economically infeasible
3. Nyc has a very strict zoning and regulation system that is reducing housing supply
I agree that 3. Is a problem. I'm not convinced mamadani is against reconsidering zoning and regulation to increase supply. Nothing I've heard suggest he would be.
You are thinking of rent stabilization, but that's not close to the same thing.
1. rent control is a specific, technical term which represents about 24k units
2. rent stabilized representing about 1M sets limits on rent increases in exchange for tax breaks for the building
3. corruption
What's next, "these people are technically not in poverty, they're income challenged"
It's not "defining a new term."
In New York City, "Rent Control" is the official name of a specific program/set of laws and "Rent Stabilization" is the official name of a different specific program/set of laws.[0]
And since we're talking about New York City housing laws/policies and that Mamdani is proposing a rent freeze for units in one of those two programs, being specific about it isn't semantics at all.
The all-encompassing term that you thought you were using a gotcha on is "rent regulation."
Please! Put some knowledge on, your ignorance is showing. Sheesh!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation_in_New_York
Edit: Added ">" to identify the section I quoted.
45% of apartments in NYC
I don't doubt that immigration has probably marginally impacted the market, that doesn't change the fact that rent in NYC is still increasing YoY and is way too expensive.
And yes, the people extracting exorbitant rent cost are in fact the ones to blame. I don't understand people who seem to occupy a fairytale land in which they feel the need to defend billionaires as though they owe some fealty to them.
Is it inconceivable that one could look at the candidates and, without being a billionaire, decide that Mamdani is not a candidate they want to bet their chips on?
It's uncomfortable to take sides, but that's what politics is. It's finding out what you believe is important (e.g. helping average people make ends meet, even if it require regulation, or eliminating regulation), you will end up taking sides whether you like it or not.
I think it's incredibly naive not to consider who our choices benefit. If your choices benefit people who already have massive amounts of wealth, you should acknowledge that and be aware of that and accept the consequences of that, and vice versa. Obviously in many cases it is complicated--your choices may benefit several different classes of people and undermine others. If anything the problem with politics is that many people make choices without considering what "sides" will benefit, letting ads, propaganda, and persuasion convince them instead. This leads people to actively vote against their own interests without even realizing it.
If the goal is to vote for one's self interest, isn't it assuming a lot that this will always be aligned with one side? Sometimes self-interest means supporting one side on one issue, and a different side on a different issue. The act of taking a side is in of itself a form of compromise. I see nothing wrong with that, but that's not what people usually mean when they talk of sides.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/12/08/13190...
"Jon Stewart Busts Fed Chair Ben Bernanke On 'Printing Money' December 8, 201010:39 AM ET By
Frank James
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is so busted.
Comedy Central host Jon Stewart added his voice to others who caught the central banker contradicting himself over whether or not the Fed is "printing money" through its actions to bolster the economy.
On 60 Minutes this week, when asked by reporter Scott Pelley about the Fed's $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that is meant to lower interest rates further, the Fed chair said:
BERNANKE: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. ...
Twenty-one months earlier on the same program and to the same reporter, Bernanke said something quite different:
Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."
"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.
"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." "
The issue is that the machine stuff only works when nobody is amped up. And his broader audience is both dying off and angry at the Trump nonsense. The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them. That’s why the dog whistles were so important - he needed to get more republicans and Archie bunker types to turn out.
It’s kind of sad, Cuomo with the right people restraining him is a force. But his enemy is himself.
I voted for Zohran, but it’s worth noting that the demographic story isn’t all that clear: current counts show him losing to Cuomo in the Eastern Queens neighborhoods where those groups are significantly represented. Mamdani’s core voting base is “classic” NYC liberal: West side Manhattan, Northern Brooklyn, and Western Queens. That’s a relatively pasty set of areas, at least by NYC standards :-)
(The story with the Orthodox is also more nuanced: many of the sects like him, at least among the candidates. They like him because he’s made the right political noises around educational freedom re: yeshivas, and they absolutely despise Cuomo for his handling of COVID.)
"“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
So you know, take what he says with a grain of salt, as with all economists, who pretend to be rigorous when in fact they are anything but.
But economists don't disagree about the effects of price controls. These are easy to observe and model. These concepts are also taught to Economics undergraduates all over the world - often in their first Microeconomics class. They are not controversial.
Here is a Khan Academy video: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
(And don't give me the usual drivel about how people who are renting should be expected to assume they'll be kicked out all the time. Compassion, please. These are humans we're talking about.)
It's like a database server running out of memory and the proposed solution isn't to increase memory, but rather just reject new entries into the DB because it's full.
But what do you want to do if upgrading memory just isn't really possible quickly? What is point not to apply mitigations?
And also it does not work like this in cities. Housing is worthless to your city if the house is 1 hour outside the city. NYC can't alleviate housing costs by building more homes in Timbuktu.
>Housing is worthless to your city if the house is 1 hour outside the city
I live in LA suburb so I'm confused by this. The commute sucks downtown but an hour commute these isn't a dealbreaker.
Its also my perception that NYC's transit system isn't completely crap like LA. That should enable you to build farther out from the core city if needed.
And what I mean is: the solution to not enough housing is to build denser housing, not just more housing. That's why LA is also broken: they didn't do that. They just built further out. Which didn't alleviate housing costs, because if you work in downtown, you have to buy a house in downtown-ish, and the supply there hasn't been fixed, because we built more housing somewhere else. Which is why LA housing costs are also mega fucked.
But NYC has another problem: it's already pretty dense. Building more housing where it matters won't be easy - which is why we see proposals from mamdani to convert some commerical space to housing.
I don't know how feasible it is, but hearing that Mamdami is willing to convert abandoned post COVID businesses to dense housing is a good idea in my eyes. That would simply be too radical an idea before COVID forced the US to perform a mass WFH experiment.
>Which didn't alleviate housing costs, because if you work in downtown, you have to buy a house in downtown-ish, and the supply there hasn't been fixed, because we built more housing somewhere else. Which is why LA housing costs are also mega fucked.
I'm talking more in idealism, but to first go absurd: if we could teleport to work it wouldn't matter where we build houses.
That's the theory I go off of when I say "I assume NYC doesn't have crap public transit". I can commute downtown in 40 minutes with no traffic, but using buses and railway would take me 2.5 hours, one way. And missing a stop stalls you for an hour. Not even to mention the hours they run. That is unacceptable in an 8 hour workday.
LA's mistake (outside of NIMBY zoning laws) was thinking that you can outfreeway public transit. And I think we can safely say that has failed.the idea of suburbs can work if we had proper, modern railing that ran every 10-20 minutes and get downtown in 20 more. But I don't think anyone in tune with California needs to be reminded of how that project is going.
I think that's the core issue with detractors. Rent control is relief, and those who are not in danger only see the forest and miss the trees burned in the process.
If you only think about humans as a spreadsheet, rent control makes no sense. "You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette" kind of deal. Even some otherwise economically progressive people I know seem to miss this, but I suppose being able to comment on the internet carries a bit of security to begin with.
The gold faith interpretation lies in the idea that rent control is political poison. It's unpopular to undo rent control, so it's never undone. And I get that. But
1. I see that as sign of a weak politician. Yeah, sometimes we need higher taxes. No one "likes" taxes but we need them.
2. In some ways, trying to undo rent control means the problem isn't solved yet. There's less resistance against rent control once you see housing prices start to fall naturally.
Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development.
“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.
Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units” [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q
"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"
I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/germany-must-build-32...
BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.
Out of 3.7mm [1].
> not directly familiar with Berlin
Not comparable. Berlin froze rents “on more than 1.5 million” apartments in 2020 [2] out of about 2mm. 25% versus 75%.
Also, Berlin’s politicians didn’t propose a construction agenda. Mamdani has. (“New York City voters on Tuesday delivered a strong message in support of building more housing, passing three proposals that pitted City Hall against the City Council in an effort to rewrite decades-old development rules” [4].)
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/content/tenantprotection/pages/fast-fact...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/world/europe/berlin-gentr...
[3] https://www.berlin.de/en/news/8283996-5559700-housing-stock-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/nyregion/nyc-ballot-measu...
A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.
Second - there is no similar freeze on property taxes - or the expected inflation in maintenance costs, insurance, and so on. Again - a tax on property owners by another name.
Third - starting with a rent freeze is an indicator of a property owner unfriendly administration. Any builder would have to calculate this into their expected returns on capital investment.
Which is just fine in my book.
Builders do not have to "calculate" any of this into their "expected returns", because new construction will not be subject to rent freezes or even stabilization. You're selectively ignoring a key part of what the GP said in order to further your incorrect argument, and that's not cool.
As for your first and second points... tough shit for the landlords. That's a cost of doing business. Taxes, even implicit ones like this, change all the time. And a landlord owning a rent-stabilized unit should already know that there are limits on what kind of rent increases they can push through, and that those limits could change at any time, even to zero.
If Mamdani does this, not only is he fucked, but he might take down the national progressive movement with himself.
"Tough shit" is a good Twitter reaction. It's terrible policy. Berlin did that, and it backfired in the most predictable way possible.
New York needs more housing. New York City's public finances simply do not permit a massive public housing construction binge, and Albany can't fund a socialist mayor's public works with upstate tax dollars. That means that housing must be privately developed. New York City, just today, transferred power away from City Council and to Gracie Mansion to help facilitate new housing. That means the impediment is local opposition. The literature shows that opposition gets dampened when folks aren't afraid of gentrification; rent freezes do that.
If Mamdani takes the easy route and "tought shits" the landlords, his housing policy grinds to a halt. Market rents, covering 75% of New York apartments, will spike. The experiment will be over. He doesn't strike me as an idiot, which is why I don't suspect he'll do this.
Like Obama with ACA? He fully thought he'd be a one term president over trying to push it in. Sometimes the best thing for a city is not what's best for reelection. And I very much don't want a candidate who's only minmaxing around what will get him re-elected.
I think we need to have more faith in the people. As gen Z says, "let him cook". We're thinking too Establishment here in a time where we clearly need a different strategy. Establishment had nearly 2 decades to resolve this and it only got worse instead. Why not try a new plan while observing what went wrong before and adjusting?
Or at least be able to scrutinize when the people who want to ruin his 2028 campaign (should he rerun) are the same that tried these same tactics this year. If these tactics were effective, Mamdami wouldn't have gotten in.
> You're talking out of your ass
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
>You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
Fair enough.
>> You are ignorant of both >You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.
Would "the facts don't support your assertions in either case." be more acceptable? Or is noting a lack of knowledge in any way unacceptable?
I'm not trying to be snarky here. I just want to make sure I don't run afoul of the guidelines and make more work for you and the other already over-worked moderators.
Thanks!
It should be easy enough to reply without ugly personal abuse or swipes like "ignorant".
If someone's comment indicates a lack of important knowledge about the topic, you can just politely point out the missing information, the way you might in a respectful conversation with a friend over dinner or a beer. That's what we're aiming for on HN.
A builder isn't a land owner. They make contracts, negotiate a price, and build to that price. They're dealing with a government, so there's more money in the bank to spend if the government is truly focused on solving an issue.
A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.
>A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.
Okay, cool. I honestly don't want an atchitect who can't think 5 years on advance (when these rent control proposals are scheduled to end, should they be enacted). That short term quarterly thinking is precisely why we have been unable to build housing.
So, just pay them, and figure it out later.
The alternative is what we're currently doing, and have been doing for the past few decades: nothing. This does not work. Our current housing situation is simply not sustainable.
Builders build rent stabilized housing ("affordable apartments") in tandem with market rate unsubsidized units. There is an enormous backlog of development proposals that the city council has been sitting on for a while now. Vacancy rates in NYC are 1.4%. anything under 5% is defined as a critical housing shortage.
New housing is in such extreme demand that people pay $5k/mo for a shoebox.
Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.
If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, but you're not going to pull another 500,000 units out of your rear that way.
We can acknowledge that NYC housing is a finite and desirable resource, but we can also say that we don't want to turn it completely into an auction for the highest bidder. Rent control helps encourage diverse and vibrant communities, part of what makes the city compelling in the first place.
There also is always going to be pain. NYC has incredible global draw, so demand runs deep. It might be that you can never build your way under $2k/mo apartments there.
I get the challenge of existing property/buildings other states, etc - but it always seems weird to me that you can have single story buildings less than one mile from Manhattan in Hoboken, etc. (as the crow flies, I get transit, etc).
Feels like the big problem is we can't change anything easily anymore.
A good chunk of Hoboken was originally swampland; you can't exactly put in skyscrapers there. And even if you could, the other infrastructure (roads, water mains, sewers, trains, parking) absolutely could not support that level of development. You would basically need to bulldoze the entire town and build much wider roads etc... which would then cut into how much land could be devoted to housing.
Edit to add: genuinely baffled by the downvote. I lived in Hoboken for 7 years, and regardless of any personal opinions on the pros and cons, the town indisputably has infrastructure problems at its current density level: frequent water main breaks, flooding, over-crowded trains, buses that are too full to take on passengers, sink-holes, constant traffic jams at the few exits to town, double-parking / obstructed bike lanes, waiting lists for municipal garages (one of which is literally falling apart). The density level is objectively quite high relative to the US [1] and it's quite simply factually incorrect to list Hoboken as an example of insufficiently-dense housing in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Manhattan also has an inherent economy of scale that Hoboken lacks; Hoboken is barely over 1 square mile of land.
Meanwhile the lower-rise neighborhoods of Manhattan have roughly the same population density and building height as Hoboken. So why are you calling out Hoboken? What single-story buildings are you even talking about there, and why are you ignoring the presence of single-story buildings in Manhattan? They're rare but they absolutely do exist -- I just ate lunch in a single-story Manhattan building literally yesterday.
Many many places, if we were willing to undertake large scale public transit projects again. But no one even bothers to run on that anymore.
Office space is built totally differently than residential space, unless you want dorms with communal bathrooms and kitchens.
That being said, a return to allowing boarding house style housing would also not be the worst thing in the world for some buildings, and would probably do a lot to reduce homelessness. Hell, if I were still in my early 20s I'd be into the idea of a room to rent with shared bath/kitchen to save some money even not necessarily requiring the reduced in unit amenities.
I personally wouldn't want to live in a space like that (maybe when I was younger), but I'm not convinced this sort of thing is so bad. Some people might like it, if it would cost less than a more traditional home.
Others whose housing situation is marginal, or who are homeless, might find it much preferable to the alternative. That's not an ideal reason for doing it, but perfect is the enemy of the good.
I lived in an illegally-sublet room with no window when I first moved to New York. I worked on Wall Street, and could afford something better. But I preferred to save money versus having a window I would look out of given my work (on the weekdays) and party (on the weekends) schedule.
Communal bathrooms are fine. Communal kitchens are fine; I know plenty of New Yorkers who might occasionally use their hot plate. (This changed post Covid, for what it's worth.)
That’s if he wanted to, which I am yet to be convinced.
Further, I don’t think any City government (including NYC) is prepared to do that! - short of an already-occurring collapse.
I'm pretty radical myself and I also just don't think it's necessary. There's more than enough unusued buildings to rebuild upon or renovate than a need to seize property. Even a place as dence as NYC still has a lot of land to utilize.
I say the same thing to that: good. If you don't want to participate in society (or in this case, your job) out of political beliefs, lets get in talent that will.
>Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
That's already the situation, and that was with a mayor who was openly bailed out by Trump. About as hand rubbing as you can get.
I think that's why these "radical" solutions stick. When you've hit rock bottom, you don't want the status quo.
It doesn't do much to convince me it isn't a populist campaign promise.
He's not actually pitching any new price controls. He's proposing a temporary rent freeze on rent stabilized (rent control is tiny in comparison and unaffected by this) apartments that are already subject to limits on rent increases.
How do I know this? I live in a a rent stabilized apartment. The rent for which, even though increases are "limited" (usually somewhere around 3-5%) has more than doubled since I moved in.
So no. Mamdani isn't suggesting making any changes to the law as it has existed for at least 50 years, rather he's suggesting stopping rent increases while fast-tracking new housing, which would likely stabilize the housing market.
As an aside, which most folks don't understand, is that the vacancy rate in NYC is ~1.5%. Healthy housing markets have vacancy rates of 4-6%. Like many places in the US (and elsewhere), NYC has a housing shortage. But in NYC, that shortage is much more severe than almost anywhere else in the US.
Ask your wife. She spends a lot of time here.
By the way, When did you stop beating her?
Isn't that odd?
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
As some of the replies note, it has been rather successful and popular in other cities like Berlin.
An alternative is Austin:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.
Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.
The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."
You're not competing with 4+ techbros to an apartment in downtown Austin anymore.
Anecdotally, the local tech meetups are WAY off in participation since about June. About 1/3 of the people who used to regularly attend have completely left the city.
I live in SF and wish we would build as much and as quickly as Austin has been building. But, if we could do that, we shouldn't consider eliminating rent control until after those units are on the market.
Rental control is short term relief. Obviously, using short term solutions long term is bad. This shouldn't be an enigma.
Building housing is long term. We cannot build new houses in a year. At least, not that I know of. But new houses in 4 years does not help the citizens knocked onto the streets in those times.
You need to relive those people while also securing the future. That's why rent control fails without a proper housing reform.
You can't be mad at a pipe bursting that you used duct tape to cover. But maybe that duct tape buys you time to find a plumber, who needs time to find the right size pipes. So duct tape is still really useful, just not the end all be all.
The problem with citing studies from 1992 is that you’re missing the last 25 years of war inflation hidden through various schemes of quantitative easing and capitalization. We’ve made capital so easy to get everything is fungible and inflates as everyone from families to foreign rich people looking to exfiltrate cash from their country pumps dollars into real estate.
My parents recently passed and we sold their house in Queens for a ridiculous sum - representing a 8% CAGR. Most of that increase in value has been since 2000, and that’s driven by a surplus of capital looking for a return.
Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.
The way you fix housing is by building new housing, and letting old housing become the affordable housing.
Other countries have also directly attacked homelessness by simply building enough public housing such that anyone who wants a roof over their head can have one regardless of their ability to pay for it.
We don't mandate car manufacturers to build affordable cars (although they are free to). People with lower income rely (or should rely) on the used car market. Those cars are naturally affordable.
Car manufacturers build high margin cars for people with the money, people with the money leave a trail of used cars in their wake, people without money for a new car buy those used ones.
That's a totally sensible and functional market. No mandates or compelled charity needed.
There are very successful examples.
And on the car side, there's plenty of very cheap new options. I can literally lease a new EV for ~$100/month. Who's voluntarily building starter homes anymore? We built fleets of those in the 50s, without the song and dance that they were luxury and required time to turn into starter homes. If anything in a lot of places, the starter homes of the 50s are the relatively expensive housing of today.
Land is limited, meanwhile we've built cars for a century and maybe the last 40 yeses worth of cars are street compliant. The only thing comoarable for cars is showing what abundance can do for a market. Less people care about a 2026 Camaro being affordable if you can buy a used '05 camaro for $3000 (which is probably still and absurd price, but hey. That's less than two months of rent in CA)
https://www.nrn.com/quick-service/california-lost-16-000-res...
"It has been almost one year since California implemented a $20 minimum wage for quick-service restaurant workers, and industry experts have been debating the long-term effects the wage jump would have on the industry’s job market.
As it turns out, thus far, the 33.3% wage increase for fast-food workers in California has resulted in almost 16,000 job losses — a decline of 2.8% — across the limited-service food industry from September 2023 (when AB 1228 was signed into law) until September 2024, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Since the law went into effect in April, California’s limited-service restaurant industry has seen an employment rate decline of 2.5%."
My cousins operate fast food stores, none in California. They are doing the same thing. Starbucks let the genie out of the bottle ~15 years ago with the app. Legacy fast food like McDonalds use apps to reduce labor with the incentives of high prices for counter sales and the perception of easier ordering.
For reference, that's $2100 or so of monthly take home pay for NYC's 16.50 minimum wage. Old wisdom would mean that this should make for $700 rental prices. But I'm sure few Gen Z are expecting rent to be 30% of income.
20 bucks says Trump.
In other words: they don't care, as long as it doesn't hurt them. The core mentality of NIMBYism.
But the cause is deeper than rent price controls, minimum wage and worker protections.
After the 2008 financial crisis, western central banks digitally printed trillions of dollars (Quantitative Easing) to refloat our financial system. The collapse of 2008 was itself the result of perverse incentives leading to banks stuffed with bad mortgages due to speculative housing manias after the collapse of the Dotcom bubble and 9/11.
The response of flooding the financial system with trillions of printed money after 2008 for years was a political choice - supported by Democrats, Republicans and President Obama.
Wealth inequality is the result. It cannot be fixed at a local level through local policies. It cannot be fixed by Congress through policy or tax tweaks. It is a problem with the financial plumbing itself.
The scales and old ways of life are broken. I don't think anyone is interested in throwing it out and starting new, so we need to rebalance with the scale we have. That means readjusting tax brackets, worker wages and hours, and likely bringing down asset prices. Throwing more money into the system clearly broke stuff, so let's at least redistribute what we have if we can't easily take out the money
But lowering asset prices is a nearly politically impossible lift.
Left-wing populists will promise to deliver. But will ultimately fail. Populism ultimately is a rejection of elites. Elites who are currently failing the public. But you musn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My objection is that left-wing populism with its rejection of economic elites, rejection of capitalism and the big-tent embrace of "all" is isomorphic to right wing populism with its rejection of science (antivax), embrace of nationalism and focus on homogeneity. Economists have good ideas. Capitalism is what built the water system that nourishes NYC. A movement embracing "all" will find itself eventually fractured by vote-bank politics as tribal affiliations will dominate in the end.
I am personally focused on thinking about how rewire the financial plumbing over succumbing to either left or right wing populist movements.
Anyway - Mamdani is a forceful, and commanding speaker. His victory speech last night was truly an American original. I think he's trying to point the vector towards a better life for more people and that is a good thing.
Spoiler alert, the economy books and the economists are right
I agree that rents for uncontrolled apartments are high, but if we eliminated rent control for the rest, that wouldn't really fix anything. The formerly-rent-controlled apartments would cost just as much as the post-1979 housing stock.
The only thing that will fix our housing cost problem is a truly radical amount of new construction. Developers would love to build here, but the cost to build here is ridiculously high for policy reasons that have nothing to do with actually building.
If we could build enough housing to satisfy demand, then we might be ok eliminating rent control. Rent control is a response to housing scarcity, not the cause. You'd think economists would understand basic supply and demand.
About the only thing I do agree with is that rent control reduces the quality of available housing. Landlords are less incentivized to fix problems and maintain their buildings when they can't make market rate from their tenants.
Weirdly you get the same effect without rent control.
To address quality first, most economists would agree that landlords are incentivized to invest the bare minimum into their property that they can; this is not so much a function of income from rent. If a tenant feels generous and starts paying more for rent, the landlord will not invest more into their unit. So I find the inverse of that to be an assumption that doesn't completely add up.
Saying rent control will affect quantity is completely beside the point. Rent controls are meant to ease the financial burden on the people currently renting in NYC, not a hypothetical newcomer looking for an apartment. Housing is already a huge pain to find for lower-income new yorkers so the threat of a more scarcity doesn't really change the equation for a lot of people.
All variants of rent control etc. have been tried in Europe and have miserably failed. Quite the opposite, rents have been rising even more, and new construction has been reduced due to new politically induced risks.
Examples: Berlin, Barcelona
But as Barcelona shows, there is a feedback loop benefiting leftist populist politicians:
Higher rents, lower housing supply -> people frustrated -> leftist populists get more votes -> more stupid regulation -> even higher rents, even lower housing supply -> people more frustrated -> ...
This can go on for at least two electoral cycles.
We have a federal law which in theory could slow down price progression, but it is rarely applied. It also doesn't govern newly build apartments, so criticism usually falls short there too...
But they always think this time it'll be different I guess.
"Which party is out of touch, again?
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, in the face of hysterical opposition from the big money, has grabbed many of the headlines, which I understand — it’s an amazing story. And I wonder what the right-wing tech bros are thinking: If Wall Street couldn’t buy New York, can they really buy America?
I’m seeing some commentators argue that Mamdani will be a problem for Democrats, allowing Republicans to paint them as extremists who are out of touch with America. But Republicans would do that anyway. For what it’s worth, Mamdani may be on the left, but all indications are that he’s a pragmatist who will get along fine with the rest of his party.
Meanwhile, you know which party is out of touch and riddled with extremists? The G.O.P.
If you look at recent Republican campaigns and positioning, it’s striking how much energy they’re putting into issues that just don’t matter much to ordinary Americans. Republicans may be obsessed with trans athletes, but most people aren’t. Polls and yesterday’s elections suggest that rants about the menace of illegal aliens have a lot less traction with the public than G.O.P. apparatchiks imagine — and that Americans don’t like the spectacle of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street.
And if we’re talking about extremists within the party, well, Democrats have people like Mamdani, a mild-mannered guy who says he’s a socialist but really isn’t. The Republican Party, by contrast, has been largely taken over by outright fascists, and is facing a major outbreak of old-fashioned antisemitism."
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/which-party-is-in-trouble...
But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left.
It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL improvements as a mission, is now so deeply forked from the base that sprung today's results. Politicians like Zohran won't be bought off by Palantir money. So, what's Peter Thiel and Gary to do? Where is Marc Benioff going to park his money? Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, Laurene Jobs, Ben Horowitz - all of these people aren't doing the normal pay for play donations, they are interested in shaping the party in their image. Well, Zohran doesn't look like you.
GrowSF is a conservative group with a right-wing policy platform trying to pretend it's progressive, so I'm not sure why that would be surprising.
The SF tech millionaires/billionaires are not progressive. They may have claimed to be in the past, but that was either opportunism, or they lost it as they made more money and saw people like Trump and Musk gain power.
Grow SF really only exists to go after city council members or school board members who get into twitter fights with a certain someone.
https://x.com/aphysicist/status/1937879912221667792
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-peter-thiel-warns...
Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.
[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/733977
The question is if it is enough - and I would be quite certain it's just a band aid. Unless you impose the construction of cheap housing, cheap housing will tend to not get built - almost every interest is opposed to it.
What is NOT fine is when you have banks and private equity bullshit chasing homes purely as an asset to flip. That’s the thing we need to curtail, because it’s just money laundering at the expense of the American homeowner.
Maybe? Seems to me that there's a certain level of wealth where this no longer is true. Housing has (unfortunately in my eyes) become one of those black boxes that you put money in and money comes out; it's an investment. But what you're telling me goes contrary to what I know about the housing market: no, actually, houses depreciate in value because they'll have to ask poor people to buy / rent the place at some point. Can I go buy a mansion built in 1930 for a bargain price?
(I do agree about the private equity part, just the first bit doesn't pass a sniff test from me)
How many times do we need to learn that trickle down economics doesn't work? Making the rich richer and happier will never "trickle down" to the poor, it will stop at the rich.
With land, this is particularly obvious. There is a finite amount of land. The more of it is occupied with luxury mansions, the less land will be available for high-density housing. Building 1 new luxury mansion removes land from the pool that could house dozens if not hundreds of people. And rich people don't move in from cheaper housing to more expensive, they just keep both, or they buy the new mansion as a vacation home.
Property is an investment, and there are huge vested interests in keeping property values going up - and not just from rich people, but virtually everyone who owns their own home. You have to fight a lot of these interests to force prices to go down. "Just build more" doesn't work, the space in and around a city is limited.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
The story tonight isn't about Trump at all though, it's about millennial DSA types beating the establishment Democratic institution - in NYC, Detroit, Mississippi. In 24 everyone was astonished at the lack of response - "what is DNC going to do about losing to Trump, twice?". This is the beginning of what will be the eventual answer.
Also it doesn't need to be said, but the mobilization of 1M+ votes for Zohran's campaign today renders the fringes meaningless. He's now automatically in the conversation for the Presidential primary for 2028.
I'm really happy he won, but this will not happen
He was born in Uganda, so that ain't happening.
There seem to be people who voted for Trump as an anti establishment candidate. Now, they're obviously completely unmoored from reality, but perhaps they'd like another anti establishment candidate?
If anyone here is well-read on his policies and they have specific opinions I'd love to hear what you think.
Do you think Zohran will be successful with his agenda or will he get blocked by pushback from other political forces? I read some commentary that a few of his policy ideas are unfeasible without support from Albany, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that relationship.
Many online figures have become heavily invested on this mayoral election despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I think that speaks to a real hunger for greater political experimentation.
As an aside, how do you evaluate the lessons that you learn or derive from what others are doing? Generalization sure is a tricky thing.
I don’t think I like several of his ideas or think he will get most of them passed. In fact I think a few like “freezing the rent” are actively bad
But I’m happy to finally have a politician who lives in and loves New York and is earnestly trying to my the city better. If he tries and fails, it will be better than our other politicians that have stopped trying
Combining it with streamlining city approval process and building more actual city development will actually stabilize the rent across the market.
His campaign revolves around three policies:
1. Universal Child Care 2. Fast and Free Busses 3. Freezing Rent for certain Rent Controlled Units
In any other context these would be policies that basically every citizen, except for a handful of people making buttloads of money off the privatization of childcare, housing, and transportation would support, yet somehow in the USA this is "radical". Somehow a candidate finally proposing positive policies that directly benefit citizens is a radical socialist who needs to be stopped and we all need to vote for the disgraced former governor who resigned after killing seniors during covid and groping his employees. Even here on HN where people are generally well educated you have people arguing. that Mamdani will somehow be the ruin of new york.
Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
> are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
This myth is promulgated constantly with no evidence to back it up. The tax increases he has proposed are a drop in the pond to the bracket he aims to tax. If those people care so little for the city, so be it, they can leave. I don't need to share communal space with people who want to live as atoms and don't actually care about the place they live beyond how it affects their bottom line. If they actually love NYC for the city it is, they will stay. The increases are not going to be untenable for those people, it all comes down to their priorities, and if they don't want to prioritize NYC, then yes, they should gtfo because they are characterless, tasteless people who only care about themselves and their money.
Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.
Why is owning a home important? I do not think that home ownership is what most people want. We have attempted to make this desirable at through state intervention by pitching housing as an investment instead of a durable good.
saying one of the many reasons rent is good “is not about rent” doesn’t mean there’s no clash in the argument.
All moving to an entirely ownership model would do is reduce elasticity of the housing market, which would be disastrous.
I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting.
The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning.
I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.
I think this is a ridiculous statement. I don't know your background, but I grew up in extreme poverty (by Canadian standards). In the welfare complexes I lived in growing up, living in a home you owned seemed like an unattainable dream. The ability to choose between owning a home and renting a home is representative of a degree of economic freedom that is becoming unattainable for many, many people.
There is absolutely merit to the idea that choosing to rent is a good choice for many people, but in most cases the people who would make that choice are inclined to do so because they either desire or require mobility in terms of relocation, and frequently the reason people desire that is the opportunity to pursue better economic opportunities (jobs, investments, etc).
The amount of people I grew up with who viewed having a house as a way to become wealthy was large. Which is silly. (Real housing prices : median income) cannot continue to climb in a society that has decreasing population without some sort of external intervention. Poor people spending the entirety of their money on a house will be the ones left holding the bag, which is part of why it irks me so much.
They very often are, heck, the president himself is a real estate mogul. And most politicians own several homes each.
> I do not think that home ownership is what most people want.
It is, though.
Comparing to the real world, the cost of rent is greater than that, because people are paying a premium for their inaccess to capital. Looking at where I live, the hypothetical value is approximately the condo fees (5.5% interest, 1% property tax, 6-and-change% appreciation), which for a 2b2b apartment around around $600 bucks a month. Rent for an equivalent apartment literally next door is $2700 a month. That suggests that more than 75% of the value of rent is paying for inaccess to capital, i.e., textbook rentseeking.
What if we built some on spec and then charged people who live in them a monthly fee to recoup the cost. That way we could build more houses immediately without having to get all the money together all at once. We could then use the extra money to build even more houses.
Through... rent?
As for population e.g. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...
It’s been a truly exhausting election cycle for New Yorkers who have been lectured from all sides by people who don’t even understand how the city works.
Switzerland has had rent control for a long time, and seems to have (rather successfully) avoided this economic basket case fate.
In case of the cities you don't even need to move that far. I know multiple people in Seattle who just moved to nearby towns 105-15 minutes by car, 20-45 by transit) to avoid Seattle specific issues, and some people who move just outside of king county to avoid even more nonsense. Mostly techies, but not exclusively.
It's not like American cities haven't been hollowed out before, NYC included.
I'll also caveat that any parallels you might see in Seattle don't really apply to NYC. Besides the low car ownership rates, wealthy individuals choose to in NYC for it's convenience and culture, which really are unique in the US.
As they say... (often misattributed to John Steinbeck, but at best its really a rough paraphrase of something he wrote) "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
The truly wealthy have long convinced the average "middle class" American that they exist in roughly the same social class (even though this has always been an insane lie) but this illusion is quickly falling away due to current economic circumstances causing untenable concentration of wealth.
Ultimately its the absolute naked greed of the truly wealthy that is causing this realignment (that is likely to end badly for them as well) to happen. They are so dead set against making even the smallest move toward fair taxation that they are creating a situation in which the shrinking middle class have no choice but to see that they are quickly becoming an endangered species whose relative fortunes are moving rapidly down rather than slowly up.
Nobody willingly does this. If you think they are, that should be a strong sign to you that those people and you disagree about what their best interests are, and you should seriously consider the possibility that they are right and you are wrong. You might not be wrong, but jumping to "they are voting against their own interests because they are dumb" as many do is both unhelpful and untrue.
Because that's what the opposition, wrapped in the flag, tells voters to do.
You can’t help but laugh at the amount of hysteria about Mamdani. No cost childcare? Free buses? Using existing rent control regulations to keep rent affordable? Oh no
Also this is a city- since when does a mayor set economic policies.
Last I checked free busses, and no cost childcare, still need someone to pay for them.
Rent control, if the rent is low, there won't be any rental property. What's the next step, forcing people to build? The city will build?
I guess we shall see. The sad thing is that people didn't vote because they considered all the ideas and the implications. The other sad thing is that maybe Mamdani was the best candidate.
Childcare, buses and rent control are all under the control of the NYC mayor.
> Last I checked free busses, and no cost childcare, still need someone to pay for them.
Most places have “free” roads and public schools and survive just fine. The point in invoking Europe is to say that having a higher tax burden and getting more public services in return is not some crazy North Korean dystopia. It’s pretty common. If it’s not for you that’s absolutely fine, just don’t move to NYC.
I believe Europe has plenty of toll roads as well ;)
I find it weird that these priorities are set at a level of a city. I mean NYC is a big city but it is part of a state and a country. There are much better economies of scale and ability to exert control at the levels of government these policies usually exist at.
> There are many more layers to the difference between where the US sits and Europe. Hopefully this is obvious.
It is exceedingly obvious. The reason for my comparison wasn’t because I think they are the same place, I was responding to a commenter who said North Korea and Kabul were appropriate comparison points for Mamdani’s plans. My point is simply that immediately invoking North Korea is hysteria.
New York City's economy [1], were it a country, would sit at No. 18 in the world between the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia [2].
The only EU members with economies larger than its are the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France and Germany.
(New York City's budget [3] is bigger than the military budgets of every country on the planet except for America, China and Russia's [4]. On par with the budgets of Ukraine and the Philippines [5].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City $1.3tn
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[3] https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/06/30/2915/ $116bn
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
I guess we'll watch this experiment unfold.
Appreciate the data points though but I think a city is ... a city. We don't usually talk about "economy of a city" because it's not that meaningful. If NYC wished to become a country I guess they can go for it.
You cited “economies of scale and ability to exert control at the levels of government these policies usually exist at.” New York has those.
The point at which it becomes “not meaningful” is well after the point that most countries in the EU turn into rounding errors.
Looking at the financials they are already subsidized to the tune of >50% : https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2... ... So the city needs to find at least $7.5B a year just to keep growing their debt at the same rate. But that's ok- if every person in the city just pays another $400 or so a year in taxes they'll get that covered. Socialism...
> I guess we'll watch this experiment unfold.
None of this is new, though. Mamdani being elected will make no difference to the scale at which NYC operates.
Since the 2008, the day after every election of a new president, the coalition that elected them had this sense of hope for a brighter tomorrow. One which disappeared within months.
Except maybe 2016, but the bubble I was in was so preoccupied by shock that maybe I missed it (also, I was deeply engrossed in the work I was doing that fall)
Western Europe has been on vacation for 30 years. There is no future where they can stay on the path they have been on. European leaders recognize this, but how the hell do you get a generation raised with an easy life to recognize this?
Germans work 400 hours a year less than Americans, and they celebrate that. Good luck.
Yes, everyone everywhere should endeavor to... checks notes... work the maximum number of hours in a year.
So you have all of Europe using American software, running on American or Chinese hardware, all imported rather than home built.
This "foreign dependent" theme repeats again and again as you go through why Europeans need to get off their asses and drop their perceptions towards industry.
And this doesn't even mention the population age crisis.
I could probably swing this for maybe 5 years.
But after that?
I'd be very low on cash, missing valuable workplace skills, selling my home to downsize, and scrounging for money anywhere I could. Bad financial shape, and forced to give up all those great comforts.
This is what Europe has been doing, on a ~50 yr timescale. They are about 35 years into it, and the writing is on the wall. Euro leaders see it. Unfortunately for Europe, there is now a whole generation that only knows that laid back easy life. Meanwhile Europe needs to double defense spending (cut services) while fostering domestic technology development (cut taxes), all while having a top heavy population (guaranteed generous benefits). All the things necessary to stand on their own, with a hostile next door neighbor who desperately wants the former soviet lands back. And all the things that say "You need to work more for less".
If Europe doesn't get it together in the next 5-10 years, the EU will fracture, and there likely will be another European ground war.
The call is inside the house. Puritan ethics will not stop China from overtaking the US.
>Germans work 400 hours a year less than Americans, and they celebrate that. Good luck.
You have a dedicated HN work account with 15337 karma.
- A 64-year-old pensioner man faced charges for antisemitic posts and for calling a politician a "professional idiot."
- Interior Minister Nancy Faeser reported multiple citizens to police for criticisms made on social media. In one case, a journalist published a satirical meme digitally altering a photograph of Faeser holding a sign reading "I hate freedom of speech" — and was prosecuted and given a seven-month suspended sentence.
- In 2017, 19-year-old Chelsea Russell quoted a line from Snap Dogg's song "I'm Trippin'" on Instagram: "Kill a snitch nigga, rob a rich nigga." She was charged with sending a "grossly offensive message." Despite being Black and posting in tribute to a deceased 13-year-old friend, she was convicted, fined £585, and subjected to a curfew and ankle monitoring.
- Lucy Connolly was convicted and sentenced to two years and seven months in prison for posting during anti-immigration riots that she hoped someone burned down a hotel containing asylum seekers. She later deleted the post.
- France has applied existing discrimination laws to criminalize BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) activists, treating anti-Israel speech as incitement to religious discrimination. The Court of Cassation ruled BDS boycott calls violated French law.
- Senator Miguel Castells wrote an article claiming the government was failing to investigate murders. He was convicted of insulting the government and sentenced to a year in prison. The European Court of Human Rights ruled his right to free speech had been violated, after which Spain's Constitutional Court developed case law providing greater protection to free speech.
- The satirical magazine El Jueves published a comic strip featuring images of the current King and Queen of Spain, which the public prosecutor's office held to be defamatory. A judge agreed to seizure of the publication.
All western countries btw, Norway falls in the North European country
The "where exactly" is the "western europe" from the comment I replied to. Sure, you can't be convicted of blasphemy everywhere there, but the fact that you can be charged with a crime that most sane people assumed hadn't been a thing since the Spanish Inquisition anywhere in Europe is pretty shocking.
Politicians catering to voters used to getting benefits for free and refusing to adjust to common sense policies like increasing retirement age with life expectancy.
Years when essential defense investments were skipped in favor of populist handouts put us at risk from hungry, militaristic psychopaths.
Western Europe had the horrifying example of Eastern Europe who was cold and hungry until we switched to capitalism. Sadly, it looks like it learned nothing from us.
In France pensioners earn more on average than a 25 yo, there is a crony capitalism based on hyper-regulation where the incumbents keep their place by bribing polticians into adopting policies that benefit large corporations.
Rent and house prices boom, all the while average natality is going lower and lower, and there is an increasing brain drain towards America.
I wish the people building bunkers, buying New Zealand citizenship, support razing social safety nets for tax cuts, and fetishize civilizational collapse (while simultaneously chipping at its foundations aggressively) realized this.
You’re not talking to bilionaires on this site, only a portion of bilionaires know about making money, which has no relation whatsoever to having a good grasp about political philosophy, large-scale economic principles and statesmanship.
In their favor
We each do our best for us and our own - it's natural. Capitalism is ensuring the society advances and benefits disproportionally more.
Take Bezos for example: his wealth is about 255B but the company he founded has a market cap of 2.67 trillion - that 2.41T difference is wealth created for other people. Not to talk about the products and services improving the society and our lives every day...
Also, what worked in the past, in different places or different demographics does not mean it will work again today.
I'm not talking about billionaires vs. everyone else here, I'm talking about the top 30% and how it's chock full of people who "get" the structure, understand the mechanics, and do good for themselves.
If these people were aware of the current moment instead of just confused and trapped in their own ideological bubble, they would probably all be wearing MAGA hats, since the authoritarian right is the only way they can realistically hold on to their rotten system in the long run. Curious why that's not a lesson they learned from history, too uncomfortable to think about that part I suppose.
For decades mainstream parties (both centre-left and centre-right) have repeatedly promised change but after getting into power somehow (re-)converged on technocratic, market-friendly "consensus politics".
If you're worried about stagnant wages, job insecurity, crumbling public infrastructure and/or the cost of housing, then you probably don't notice - or care - whether the stock markets are going up.
Allegedly she was tapped to direct "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", but her then 14 year old son talked her out of it to do "The Namesake" instead
For whatever reason, for some it's more gratifying to see others fail to prosper if it confirms their beliefs than it is to watch others succeed and have their beliefs challenged (even if it's to their own detriment).
In many cases, I imagine those who would see themselves as "good" use their world view as a way of absolving themselves of guilt for their actions. If I believe that there was never enough for most to lead dignified lives and that society rewards only self-interest, I don't have to regret taking more than necessary, and I can justify my apathy to the suffering of others. "It is the way of things," I can think to myself, "anything else would be foolish and naive." In this way I can find satisfaction even in inequality, comforted by its inevitability--and my own cleverness in understanding it.
I think most of his major policies are pretty bad, but I also think the reaction against him has been over the top.
He is going to need cooperation from the state legislature, if he wants to collect the taxes needed to fund his policies, and I’m not sure how successful he will be at that.
A lot of people are rooting both for and against him, so it’s going to be interesting either way.
Why? How much of NYC's budget comes from Albany?
My impression was that NYC had its own budget, paid for by its own taxes.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forrest_Dillon#Dillon's_Rule
(de facto realpolitik-wise NYC will continue existing, but my point is to widen your Overton window to realize even NYC's own taxing authority is still under NYS' jurisdiction)
---
Btw, federal and state funds were each ~1/6 of NYC's revenue in 2021: https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/understandingthebudget....
If those who claimed they would leave NYC for Florida (etc.) make good on their promises NYC will see a significant drop in tax revenues while the expenditures will skyrocket due to Mamdani's free-stuff policies. They can try to increase taxes which will lead to more net tax payers leaving the city. Of course it remains to be seen whether all those who said they would leave - up to a million people according to the legacy media - end up doing so but if this comes to pass those free buses might not end up happening after all. He'll probably blame it on the exodus and wash his hands clean off his campaign promises.
https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/one-mill...
https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/us-news/nearly-a-million-new-y...
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/nearly-a-million-new-yo...
That is why I said up to a million people according to the legacy media. I'm pretty sure a sizeable number of people will leave NYC due to the election results but I don't know how many.
A new Florida Atlantic University poll reveals that nearly half of Florida
residents have considered moving due to rising costs of living, despite the
state’s continued reputation as an affordable destination for many who live in
northern areas of the U.S.
The poll, conducted by FAU’s Business and Economic Polling Initiative,
surveyed 1,000 Floridians and found growing economic frustration as property
taxes, home insurance, and housing costs continue to climb.
“Insurance. That’s the biggest one,” one resident said when asked about
financial pressures.
The findings come as a surprise to researchers, given Florida’s traditional
appeal as an escape from high-cost northern states.
https://www.wflx.com/2025/11/04/florida-residents-weigh-leav...
Pretty similar. I'm not much of a socialist, but I'm shocked how extremely racist the opposition has been too. He cares. The opposition don't seem to care at all.
Sounds a lot like the justification many people used to vote for another guy.
What to make of that similarity is yet to be seen.
I hope Mamdani succeeds for the sake of New York (California resident here) and hopefully this win inspires other young people around the country to participate in politics.
It’s been said that it’s impossible for a New York City mayor to be uncorrupt. By the nature of getting the position, you must be a corrupt individual. That’s why you see so many past mayors and potentials having such a shameful history.
Mamdani feels like a break from that tradition. I wish the Bay Area could replicate something similar. We suffer from similar issues as NYC but we are constantly getting conservative leaning officials who refuse to get law enforcement to do their job. Breed was a center politician (right leaning in any other western country), and now we have a center right mayor. I’ve not really noticed much improvement in the bay - even with the current mayor’s constant posting on TikTok. I just see him blocking housing development and congratulating developers on building more empty office space in a city that desperately needs more housing.
Not a surprise if you’ve lived here for a while. The Bay Area is incredibly conservative for all its performative wokeism.
Not so much. The NY Metro Area has the highest GDP of any metro area in the US[0]. The San Francisco Bay Metro area ranks fourth, behind NYC, Los Angeles and Chicago.
But don't feel too bad about it. It could have happened to any Metro area.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...
NYC generates like 2+ trillion GDP all on its own. It is the largest metropolitan economy in the world let alone the United States. I don't know how much NYC actually depends on federal money, but if there's any city that has a chance to figure out how to make it through a government funding squeeze, it's NYC.
Honestly I think the only recourse the fed has to put pressure on NYC is the actual gestapo shit they've already been pulling in Chicago.
That's because he's a democratic socialist, not a communist like they want people to think. If people really looked into the policies of the DSA they would support it. There is a reason Einstein, Keller, and more were adamant supporters.
They're one of the many things tightly controlled by the unseen hands. It's theatre with a crazy advertising budget
I hope this time it's different though, NY
https://apps.npr.org/2025-election-results/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2025-elections/maine-ballot...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/aftab-pureval-wins-ree...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/pennsylvania-supr...
https://thehill.com/homenews/5589670-gop-incumbents-lose-sea...
(California Prop 50 returns aren’t in yet, but I’m hopeful based on turnout as of this comment)
My fear is the US will cycle dumb right to stupid left, which helps absolutely nobody.
It's too early to eval mandarin... that will come ... but this under current has now got first and second derivative postive.
I agree, but having a "stupid left" is a whole lot better than a "dumb right" who is authoritarian and willing to side step everything in their hopes of creating a christo-fascist utopia.
Now for the other stuff. He is a pretty extreme socialist. He wants to raise taxes on rich guys, businesses. Make buses free, rent controls, defunding the police, city run stores and more. These are great vote winners and terrible ideas. All of that has been tried and failed many times. As a political belief system socialism is a disaster. Thatcher pointed out that no other political experiment has been run as long and has so completely failed as socialism. I think his ideas represents all of the worst excesses of the Democrat party.
Then there's the man personally. My impression of him is he's basically a spoiled rich kid who's never had to work a day in his life. That doesn't mean he's not allowed to be ambitious, but it does put into question his credentials as a genuine socialist. It's easy to hold popular opinions when they won't affect your lifestyle in any way.
Finally there's the ugly stuff. He has used the term "globalise the intifada". For any of his apologists who will claim that phrase has any peaceful connotations, imagine a populist saying "globalise National Socialism". Would you be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt? NYC is perhaps the most important city in the world. I'm worried for it.
Being a basically a edgy candidate from a Green EU party doesn't require a vow of poverty, nor an actual take-the-means-of-production Socialist for that matter. He's the son of a college professor and a filmmaker with award winning movies and docs with shitty box offices. Clearly extremely comfortable, but straight humble compared to "my daddy made me campaign manager" Cuomo.
I'm sure his proposals aren't optimal for his parents home equity.
> He has used the term "globalise the intifada"
He never said it. It just the ol' reliable "Mr Candidate, do you condemn the phrase 'I love kicking puppies'? No, saying that’s not the language that you use is not valid for some reason." I recommend to expand your news diet.
That's not universal. The City of Vancouver for example has a party system, though the parties are largely not affiliated with provincial or federal parties. There are exceptions there as well though - the Vancouver Greens are affiliated with both the provincial and federal Green parties.
Some cities have non-partisan mayoral elections. For example, Miami does this under Home Rule charter.
Still, it's often clear who's who. For example, Emilio González prominently displayed a POTUS lapel pin during a debate and bragged about being able to interface with Trump and DeSantis.
Specifically, I think a political party happens when two politicians make a bargain that they will each vote for some of the other politician's policies. They don't have to call it "the X party" for it to be a de facto political party.
There are some offices which are designated as nonpartisan here in the US too, I think they are typically offices which don't have a lot of scope for this sort of bargaining. If they did have scope for such bargaining, I wouldn't want to rely on the honor system in the long term. I would want to codify it into law somehow. But how? The best way is probably to reduce the incentive for striking bargains somehow? Again, how? Or maybe bargains are just a distraction, and the real problem lies elsewhere? As I said, people should be thinking more.
https://cityjournal.substack.com/p/big-city-progressives-kee...
The actual solution is to repeal the morass of regulatory restrictions on housing that have been put in place since 1960.
Per 1,000 residents, only 2.68 houses were built in San Francisco between 2010 and 2020, compared to 12.66 houses between 1950 and 1960.
For New York, only 2.38 houses were built per 1,000 residents between 2010 and 2020, compared to 8.88 houses between 1950 and 1960.
Regulatory restrictions imposed on housing in San Francisco and New York since 1960:
San Francisco:
- 1960: City Planning Code (Zoning Ordinance) - Established zoning districts with specific regulations on use, density, building types, minimum lot sizes (e.g., 2,500 sq ft for most, 4,000 for R-1-D), and one-for-one parking requirements per dwelling unit, restricting housing types by enforcing low-density controls and increasing development costs through compliance and parking mandates.
- 1970: California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) - State law requiring environmental impact assessments for projects, significantly lengthening permitting times (often adding years due to reviews and litigation) and increasing costs for housing development through extensive studies and potential mitigations.
- 1978: Comprehensive Rezoning and Adoption of RH (Residential House) and RM (Residential Multi-family) Districts - Reduced zoned capacity for housing on the city's West Side, making thousands of multi-family properties non-conforming, restricting allowable densities and types of housing, which limits supply expansion.
- 1979: San Francisco Residential Rent Stabilization Ordinance (Rent Ordinance) - Imposed rent controls on multi-family units built before June 1979, limiting annual rent increases (typically 2% or less), which can increase overall housing costs by reducing incentives for new construction and maintenance, indirectly restricting supply.
- 1979: Condominium Conversion Ordinance - Limited annual conversions of rental units to condominiums (initially 1,000, later 200 for 2-6 unit buildings), preserving rentals under rent control but restricting ownership housing options and potentially increasing costs by limiting market flexibility.
- 1981: Residential Hotel Demolition and Conversion Ordinance - Prohibited demolition or conversion of residential hotel units without one-for-one replacement or in-lieu fees to an affordable housing fund, increasing costs and permitting times for redevelopment projects involving such properties.
- 1985: Office Housing Production Program - Required large office developments (25,000+ sq ft) to provide affordable housing, donate land, or pay fees based on new employees, linking commercial to residential mitigation, which raises costs and can lengthen approvals for mixed projects.
- 1986: Proposition M (Office Development Limit) - Capped annual office space approvals and introduced a competitive "Beauty Contest" process prioritizing affordable housing and neighborhood preservation, lengthening permitting times and increasing costs through required community benefits.
- 1992: Inclusionary Housing Policy - Mandated 10% affordable units in planned unit developments or projects needing conditional use permits outside redevelopment areas, increasing development costs by requiring set-asides.
- 2002: Inclusionary Affordable Housing Ordinance (Planning Code §§ 415, 419) - Required 15% on-site or 20% off-site affordable units (or in-lieu fees) for projects of 10+ units, directly raising building costs and potentially restricting project feasibility.
- 2010: Revisions to Inclusionary Housing Policy - Adjusted post-Palmer decision to favor fees over units, increasing costs for developers not building affordable housing on-site, which can deter middle-income projects.
- 2012: Housing Trust Fund (Proposition C) - Captured revenue for affordable housing but reduced inclusionary obligations by ~20% for some projects while capping others, potentially increasing costs for non-qualifying developments.
- 2013: Condominium Conversion Ordinance Amendment - Allowed ~2,200 TIC units to convert with fees up to $20,000 per unit to an affordable fund, but imposed a 10-year moratorium on further conversions, restricting housing type changes and adding costs.
- 2016: Amendment to Inclusionary Affordable Housing Program - Voter-approved increase from 12% to 25% on-site affordable units, deemed economically infeasible by studies, raising development costs and potentially reducing overall housing production.
- 2016: Amendment to Planning Code for Legalization Program - Required Conditional Use Authorization to remove unauthorized units, adding discretionary reviews that lengthen permitting times and increase costs.
- 2017: Executive Directive 17-02 - Mandated additional coordination and deadlines for approvals, which, while aiming to streamline, can extend permitting times for complex projects due to heightened administrative requirements.
New York City:
- 1961: New York City Zoning Resolution - Overhauled zoning to emphasize low-density districts (60% of residential lots in lowest categories, 12% single-family only), imposed parking and open space requirements, and created manufacturing zones prohibiting residences, restricting housing types, increasing costs via parking mandates, and limiting adaptive reuse.
- 1969: Rent Regulation Laws (State and City Rent Stabilization) - Instituted controls on rents and evictions, making it costly and time-consuming to demolish or redevelop regulated buildings (tenants can demand high buyouts), reducing supply and increasing development costs.
- 1974: Amendments to Rent Regulation Laws - Extended protections to post-1974 buildings under certain conditions, further complicating demolitions and renovations, raising costs by making land assemblage infeasible and limiting new housing supply.
- 1975: State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), Implemented Locally as City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) in 1976 - Required environmental reviews for discretionary projects, adding extensive analyses, potential litigation, and delays (often years), significantly lengthening permitting times and increasing costs.
- 1977: Ground Floor Use Regulations for High-Density Neighborhoods - Mandated 50% of ground floors on major streets for specific retail/restaurant uses in post-1977 buildings, restricting flexible mixed-use designs and increasing costs for housing in such areas.
- 1980s: Residential Conversion Rules for Obsolete Nonresidential Buildings - Limited conversions to pre-1961 (later extended to 1961-1977) buildings in specific areas, restricting adaptive reuse for housing and adding costs through narrow applicability.
- 1981: Retention of Stricter NYC Building Code (Non-Adoption of State Uniform Code) - Maintained unique, more stringent code requirements, increasing construction costs due to specialized materials and complex enforcement, while potentially delaying permits.
- 1987: Quality Housing Zoning Text Amendments - Imposed contextual requirements in medium/high-density zones (R6-R10), limiting density and design options, making cost-effective projects harder and restricting housing types.
- 1989: Lower Density Contextual Zoning Amendments - Reduced density by nearly 50% in R3-R5 zones, enforcing height, setback, and type limits, decreasing multi-family production and increasing costs in medium-density areas.
- 1989: Attempt to Raise Taxes on Vacant Land - Proposed higher taxes to spur development, but increased holding costs, potentially deterring or raising expenses for housing projects on such land.
- 1991: State Requirement for Residentially-Zoned Vacant Land Tax Classification - Kept lower tax rates for vacant land outside Manhattan, reducing incentives to build and indirectly increasing housing costs through delayed development.
- 1996: Local Law 37 (Third-Party Transfer Law) - Authorized city transfers of tax-delinquent properties, adding complexity to land acquisition for housing, lengthening times and costs especially with condemnation.
- 1999: Sprinkler Requirement Law - Mandated sprinklers in buildings with 4+ units or renovations costing 50%+ of value, directly increasing construction and renovation costs.
- 2002-2013: Bloomberg Administration Neighborhood Rezonings (Including Downzonings and Contextual Rezonings) - Decreased development capacity in some areas and limited potential via contextual rules, restricting types and slowing construction in high-demand neighborhoods.
- 2005: Greenpoint/Williamsburg Rezoning - Retained high retail parking requirements in parts, necessitating large garages in apartment buildings, raising costs and deterring housing.
- 2007: Increase in Minimum Size for 421-a Tax Incentive - Raised threshold from 3 to 4 units for eligibility, making smaller multifamily projects less viable and increasing relative costs.
- 2016: Zoning for Quality and Affordability (ZQA) Update - Modernized provisions but failed to boost density significantly, maintaining restrictions on housing types in low-density zones and adding regulatory complexity that can extend permitting.
- 2018: Special Permit for New Hotels in Light Manufacturing Districts - Required permits with union conditions for hotels, deterring construction and limiting reuse of surplus hotels for housing, increasing conversion costs.
- 2019: Amendments to Rent Stabilization Laws - Applied stabilization to some market-rate units under 421-a if rents fall below thresholds, reducing developer incentives for new rentals and increasing costs in middle-income areas.
Everyday I grow more blackpilled about the balance of powers in the US if this is what the left-wing has going for it.
[0] His name alone should be a synonym for how bad of a candidate he was, there's no single label good enough (like sex offender) to cover how bad he was.
The city already has a crime problem
Socialism has a bad track record for a reason
This isnt even getting into hos antisemitism
Perhaps you don't know what you are talking about?
NYC is not Norway.
People in Norway let babies sleep outside the supermarket when they go shopping. When you have that level of trust in a society, socialism has a fighting chance for sure.
I think the establishment messed up big time here and Mamdami snatched it up.
How about watch some actual interviews in which Mamdani states what he wants to do rather than only get your information from third parties who clearly want to emphasize particular angles?
You sound like a doom sayer who'd stop investing in the USA because the current admin has made it an unsafe environment.
Austin reduced rent prices by ~20% by building more housing even as the overall city population grew. Other small cities have seen rents decrease through active immigration policing. We know how to fix housing pricing there's just no motivation too, people want expensive, exclusive neighborhoods
The apartment has stayed "untouched since the tenant passed away". It's clearly is still full of stuff of the deceased! I would understand if there's a big renovation needed (e.g., Asbestos removal, a hard to fix leak, replacing the entire plumbing/electric, etc.) but certainly one would've at least cleared the place oneself if the money is tight.
The non-controlled apartment he shows doesn't seem that different beyond aesthetics, sure the modern lighting and new paint job looks nice but the windows are just single-pane like the mothballed unit. I find it telling that he doesn't mention any specific issue, or that he frames not breaking even on the first month as shocking. I've seen plenty of NYC apartment tours in the internet of random 20 somethings. A lot of them didn't look like they were renovated in this millennium.
Isn't by definition, a landlord a property investor? Is it some tragedy if he has to invest and wait for a return? The building has been in his family for close to 70 years, did they do maintenance and renovations proactively? If he's so strapped for cash and doesn't have the cashflow or credit to repair the building, why doesn't he sell? Even if the price is lower because the rent control, the asset appreciation since the Eisenhower administration must be absurd.
Yes, the actual solution is building like crazy, but is kinda insulting to blame rent control while showing landlords crying woe is me and sealing apartments with the tenant fresh in the morgue, transparently making a bet that rent control will be repealed because they are letting their units to rot.
It's the same term Trump has been using to fear monger around Zoran's candidacy, and doesn't seem to relate to any of his actual policies.
If you can enlighten us about the relationship between 1950s soviet bloc communism in eastern europe and a fairly run-of-the-mill 2020s Bernie-styled democratic socalist platform, I'm all ears.
I don't know if a purely organic and independent socialist movement could have existed, but in this world, the movements with the means and resources to get their voices heard are going to be the ones who inherited resources and networks from their predecessors.
"But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it's BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel), right, or whether it's the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.
"And what I want to say is that it is critical that the way that we organize, the way that we set up our you know, set up our work and our priorities, that we do not leave any one issue for the other, that we do not meet a moment and only look at what people are ready for, but that we are doing both of these things in tandem, because it is critical for us to both meet people where they're at and to also organize and organize for what is correct and for what is right and to ensure over time we can bring people to that issue."
so yes, it's not 1950s soviet bloc communism. it's more like he has as a target 1917
why confidently post something so obviously wrong...?
Is that antisemitic? It's a fact that American cops are routinely trained by a foreign military with a track record of disregarding human rights. It's a fact that the NYPD has a recent history of police brutality. What's next? Mentioning that the US trained deathsquads in LATAM is Gringophobic?
Also I'm not that sure 4chan is worried about police brutality even if it's a excuse to say antisemitic slurs.
I was sold when he was willing to back down on some of his own views publicly, admitting publicly that he was wrong on some things. That kind of admission and honesty is so refreshing.
Complete opposite of Trump, MAGA, and constant lies. Kudos NYC! Time for a new era.
Also, he deserves credit for not backing down. A major push calling you a pro-9/11 jihadist? Release an ad speaking Arabic two days before the election.
It's honestly staggering how much older Trump is than this guy. 45 years!
It wasn't a world without powerful people though: party nomenklatura and their friends ruled us with an iron fist. Not billionaires in numbers but in lifestyle, power and ruthlessness.
Together with actual billionaires, we also lost all the products and services their work created in process of making them billionaires, so we were all cold and hungry.
I learned then to cherish societies where one could become billionaires: it meant there was enough economic freedom so that the tiny insignificant me could carve a honest, dignified living for me and my own without begging politician mercy for handouts.
We should have more billionaires.
The fact that Zohran won should be a wake up call to both parties, but I won’t hold my breath.
I’m just glad that it seems like people actually care, even if I think it will end up poorly. An overall win.
.. that's not a conservative, though. Especially not in the culture war era.
No clue what mamdani is like, but it seems like NYC had little to no choice...which is a bit disappointing.
Mamdani won the primary for the democrats over Cuomo, but Cuomo decided to try and do an independent run to further challenge him.
The entire establishment marshaled what forces it could to stop mamdani's momentum. Couple this with the fact that there are (unfortunately) many people out there who would rather elect accused sex offenders than risk the chance that somebody marginally aligned with a word and ideology they don't actually understand (socialism) would be elected, or more likely, and worse, people are just racist and/or islamophobic and would sooner elect a man who would grope their daughter than a man who, god forbid, has a different religion than them.
Typically, the Republican candidate would have no chance in a city like NYC. This was the case here as well, but Cuomo calculated that with the backing of establishment Democrats AND the backing of Republicans/conservatives, he'd be able to defeat Mamdani. The Republican candidate did not agree to drop out, however. In the end it didn't matter though because Zohran Mamdani won by a larger margin than Cuomo and the Republican combined
In a typical election, the main election is the primary (which happened back in June). The Democrat nominee is pretty much guaranteed to win so the general is almost a formality. This general election was actually more contested than is typical
tl;dr: his main opponent was establishment democrats
13% is not narrow
Approval voting has all the benefits ranked choice claims to have, but without the complexity - it's trivial for people to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
What is perhaps more telling is that the Democrats are putting up such a far-left candidate to the extent that even Obama can't endorse Zohran Mamdani's self-described 'democratic socialist' platform.
Until the 2010s NY actually had a shockingly long record of electing Republican leaders on both the city and state levels. Despite being "deep blue."
I think AOC will likely challenge Schumer for his seat now that mandami won.
By the time the last two left office, the prevailing sentiment about them was "good riddance." Let's see how NYC ends up feeling about this one.
But what happened? Why can’t they field a competitive candidate in cities like NYC or SF or LA or Chicago after failed admin after failed admin? Why have they given up?
You need to control cities to have any future. They need to recommit to fighting for them.
It seems like the strategy is to control state legislatures through extensive gerrymandering, then use state sovereignty to control the cities from without. Blue cities in otherwise red states are not able to experiment with local policies anymore, much to everyone’s detriment.
And it’s not that difficult to win these things, especially when you look at how objectively poor the oppositions performance has been in them. Historically they’ve been contested.
The party as a whole is uninterested in governing beyond seeking revenge and satisfying the charismatic eschatological movement that drives them. The leaders don't believe what they preach, they don't have policy goals besides "destroy what we hate", they don't have any conventional engagement with government beyond using it towards their own ends.
"Long term strategy" is a joke in this context. They're angry, they mobilize their supporters by promising revenge on a world that seems to be defying traditional structures and changing too fast. As with many reactionary movements aligned more by being "against" than "for", there's been little thought for what happens after the enemy has been defeated, and it's likely they'll continue seeking out new enemies until the movement dies from infighting or is ousted from power.
That's when you use the power of the purse to contractually bind private businesses, non-profits, universities, etc, to your preferred values. Capital beats cultural power (or so goes the current gamble)
Edit: do I need to insert hyperlinks for the strong-arm tactics this administration has tried to force contractual counter-parties to adopts it's anti-DEI culture-war posture via a clause?
Successful? Try again.
Rudy Guiliani was the most hated man in NYC on September 10, 2001.
I'm not really sure why that changed, he was a horror. Anti-democratic (small 'd') anti-freedom of expression and spent most of his time being a boot stomping on the faces of hard working New Yorkers.