{"id":48623,"date":"2025-11-22T15:32:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T15:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/48623\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T15:32:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T15:32:25","slug":"does-mamdani-know-best-new-york-city-is-about-to-find-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/48623\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Mamdani Know Best? New York City Is About to Find Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

The crux of socialism<\/a> is that central government planners believe they know better than individual people how to allocate resources across an economy.<\/p>\n

That is why the newly elected\u00a0New York City\u00a0mayor, self-proclaimed Democrat socialist\u00a0Zohran Mamdani<\/a>, believes the wealthiest people should pay more than half of what they earn to the government. While defending his proposed 54% top marginal income tax rate in a recent Fox News interview, Mamdani\u00a0said: \u201cMy point is this. If you are making $1 million in\u00a0New York City, or more than that, you can afford to pay 2% more, and the reasons you can afford to do so is because that money will be used to better your quality of life as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, would-be central planner Mamdani<\/a>\u00a0believes that he can improve overall societal well-being through redistribution and that he can improve individual people\u2019s lives by taking more of their money and spending it better than they could.<\/p>\n

That notion flies in the face of Milton Friedman\u2019s commonsense observation, \u201cNobody spends somebody else\u2019s money<\/a> as carefully as he spends his own.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a particularly audacious claim considering that\u00a0Mamdani\u00a0is talking about<\/a> some of the most capable and innovative people who have demonstrated their productivity by earning more than $1 million annually.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u00a0can\u2019t know how thousands of wealthy New Yorkers would have spent the extra taxes he wants to take from them.<\/p>\n

Suppose one high-income earner would have used that money to expand her business and create 10 new jobs, and another would have given all his newly taxed earnings to a city charity that helps lift people out of cycles of poverty. Or yet another who would have invested in a biotech startup developing gene therapies to extend human lifespans? Can Mamdani\u00a0make every one of them, or even society as a whole, better off through more rent controls, government-subsidized child care and government-run grocery stores?<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s popularity rests on his promises of \u201cfree\u201d government handouts for far more people than he plans to tax, but that promise is a pipe dream.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s\u00a0vision of a supersized European welfare state would require supersized European taxes. Already, middle-class Europeans pay tax rates comparable to what Mamdani\u00a0wants to impose on the millionaires of the Big Apple. They also pay almost twice as much in taxes, $12,000 more per year, than the same middle-class Americans. European families also pay roughly 50% higher taxes than American families.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, attempts to soak the rich also sink the middle class.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s particularly true when talking about a single city that constitutes just 2.5% of the U.S. population and less than 0.1% of America\u2019s land mass. Those who are charged with paying for all of Mamdani\u2019s \u201cfree\u201d handouts can just leave the city or the state.\u00a0New York City\u00a0already leads the nation in out-migration, having lost hundreds of thousands of residents and tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue over the past 12 years as people have fled to states such as Florida, which offer sunnier skies and zero income tax.<\/p>\n

Although the freedom to flee\u00a0New York City\u00a0is welcome relief for those who foresee the folly of Mamdani\u2019s\u00a0promises, it will be of little recompense to those whose dreams of a socialist utopia instead come at the expense of their freedom, opportunity and material well-being.<\/p>\n

What Ronald Reagan said four decades ago rings true today: \u201cA government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you\u2019ve got.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published by The Washington Times.<\/a><\/p>\n

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The crux of socialism is that central government planners believe they know better than individual people how to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[153,9,11,10,1211,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-48623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-socialism","13":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}