Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist assemblyman whom New York Democrats chose as their candidate for mayor, appeared on “Meet the Press” on Sunday to talk about how he plans to pulverize the Big Apple into an undrinkable cider. The way he espouses these wild socialist ideas so blithely can blow one’s mind.
“We went on your website and realized there’s a policy proposal that says your plan, and I’m gonna quote it for folks, is to ‘shift the tax burden from over-taxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods,’” host Kristin Welker stated. “Explain why you are bringing race into your tax proposal.”
Mamdani matter-of-factly replied that his policy proposal wasn’t based on race, even though his website specifically mentioned “whiter neighborhoods.”
“That is just a description of what we see right now,” he said. “It’s not driven by race. It’s more of an assessment of what neighborhoods are being undertaxed versus overtaxed. We’ve seen time and again that this is a property tax system that is inequitable. It’s one that, actually, Eric Adams ran on saying that he would change in the first 100 days. He’s since sought to defend it and lost at every juncture in court.”
The memo from the Mamdani campaign doesn’t specifically mention race beyond the phrase “whiter neighborhoods” in the bullet point, but the policy is straight-up far-left tax rate manipulation:
The property tax system is unbalanced because assessment levels are artificially capped, so homeowners in expensive neighborhoods pay less than their fair share. The Mayor can fix this by pushing class assessment percentages down for everyone and adjusting rates up, effectively lowering tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica and Brownsville while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones.
This is par for the course for Mamdani. My friend and colleague Stephen Green noted earlier on Monday that Mamdani has called for seizing the means of production in the past.
“If — and this is a big if — anything will get New Yorkers to re-embrace common sense (and literally any other major mayoral candidate in November), it might just be Mamdani’s embrace of old-school Marxism,” Vodkapundit wrote. “But, judging by the way even centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton have embraced Mamdani since his primary win last week, it looks like ‘Marxism, straight up’ is the future of the Democratic Party, not its past.”
Nevertheless, despite denying that this proposal had a racial component at all, Mamdani said that messing around with property tax rates to put the burden on wealthier New Yorkers isn’t racist. Welker asked him if the racial component of the bullet point stood to alienate voters, and Mamdani’s response evokes that old chestnut of “fairness.”
“I think I’m just naming things as they are, and ultimately, the thing that motivates me in this is to create a system of fairness,” he replied. “It is not to work backwards from a racial assessment of neighborhoods or our city.”
“Rather, it’s to ensure that we actually have an equal playing field, and right now, what we see with the property tax system is one that is overtaxing a number of New Yorkers and undertaxing others, and an inability of political will to resolve that,” he added.
When Welker asked if his campaign had any plans to take the racially charged language off the memo, Mamdani punted back to his effort to “ensure a fair property tax system, and the use of that language is just an assessment of the neighborhood.”
Leave it to a Democratic Socialist to casually race-monger and explain it away as an attempt at achieving fairness. Any New Yorker who votes for Mamdani deserves to suffer under his administration.
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