Crowd Chants “Tax the Rich” at Mamdani Rally; Candidate Attacks Ackman, Langone
“The billionaires got scared,” says socialist mayoral candidate at event with Sanders, AOC
The 34-year-old socialist assemblyman who is the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor of New York City is moving into the closing stretch of his campaign with a stepped-up emphasis on class warfare.
The master of ceremonies at the Sunday night, October 26, event, Sarah Sherman, led the audience of thousands at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens in chants of “Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” (At about 1:38:30 into the video). Mamdani praised her for doing an “incredible” job.
The audience repeated the “Tax the rich!” chant for an extended stretch after Senator Sanders, a socialist of Vermont, said, “It is not a radical idea to say the rich should start paying their fair share of taxes.”
Mamdani is campaigning on a $10 billion tax increase, with $9 billion of it coming from an increased income tax on those earning more than $1 million a year and an increased corporate tax rate, which economists say also winds up being a tax on the shareholders of those corporations.
The top city, state, and federal combined marginal income tax rate in New York already is about 52 percent, which has contributed to the exodus of high-earning New Yorkers to Florida. The Citizens Budget Commission says it is already the highest rate in the nation. “New York City residents earning over $25 million annually are subject to a 14.776 percent marginal personal income tax rate, comprised of the State’s 10.9 percent and the City’s 3.876 percent rates. This exceeds California’s 13.3 percent—the nation’s second highest top marginal rate. New York City residents earning $2.2 million pay a combined rate of 13.526 percent, still exceeding California.”
New York is already heavily reliant on the rich; according to the Citizens Budget Commission, “In 2012, they comprised less than 1 percent of New York State’s and New York City’s resident filers, yet paid 44 percent and 40 percent of State and City’s personal income taxes, respectively.”
In his speech concluding the Forest Hills rally, Mamdani was surrounded as an immediate backdrop—apparently intentionally, because the rally was orchestrated and planned by his campaign—by four people wearing Soviet-red sweatshirts that said “SOCIALISTS” on the front in white capital letters.
Mamdani, who arrogantly likened himself to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, denounced “corrupt politicians and the billionaires who fund them.”
“The billionaires got scared, or, as the New York Times would describe it, the Hamptons were basically in group therapy about the mayoral race,” Mamdani said.
He said of the “big money donors,” that, “they know that a reimagined New York hurts their bottom line.”
Mamdani offered a classic Karl Marx ideological view that wealth is created by stealing from labor.
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