Zohran Mamdani Touts $10 Billion Tax Increase, Government Takeover of Energy Industry
New York Times praises his “cautious” “pragmatism”
This week, the Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, called for a $10 billion a year annual tax increase and also backed the "ecosocialist" idea of the government essentially taking over energy production in New York State.
You wouldn’t learn about that from the New York Times, which has been busy falsely and inaccurately portraying Mamdani’s campaign as characterized by “cautious” “pragmatism.” The Times also showers Mamdani with favorable modifiers—”cheerful,” “optimistic,” “progressive.” “Mamdani Distances Himself From Democratic Socialists’ National Agenda,” a recent Times headline claimed. The Times headlines his meeting with centrist Mayor Bloomberg. One Times article insisted, apparently seriously, “Efforts to make voters fear socialism have a long history, said Susan Kang, an associate professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a D.S.A. member…. ‘a lot of voters don’t care.’”
If the New York Times won’t give readers the straight story on Mamdani, we here at The Editors will. Here it is:
First, that $10 billion tax increase—no small thing in the context of a city whose city-generated tax revenue as recently as 2022 was about $70 billion. Over four years, it’d be $40 billion more that Mayor Mamdani takes away from the companies and people that earned it or own it.
Mamdani confessed the plan publicly during an interview on Monday September 8 with my former New York Sun colleague Errol Louis. Louis asked him where Mamdani would cut from to fund Mamdani’s proposed programs. Mamdani replied by talking not about spending cuts but about additional tax revenues: “If you look at our policy proposal, we put forward over the course of the primary a belief that the two most productive ways in which to raise that revenue would be: One, by raising the state’s top corporate tax rate to match that of New Jersey. And two, by raising New York City’s personal income tax rate on the top 1% by 2%. Those two things together raise $9 billion. There are a number of approaches we could take in city government that would raise an additional billion dollars. That $10 billion covers the cost of our major policy programs and starts to Trump-proof this city.”
New York has a lot of news outlets. I’m in Boston. Have you seen any headlines that read: “Mamdani promises $10 billion tax increase”? Where are the editors? “Vital City,” the “housed at Columbia Law School” project that organized the Louis-Mamdani interview, published it under the bland headline “Zohran Mamdani Talks Public Safety.” The Columbia Journalism School, a festering cesspool of anti-Israel propaganda, published it under the soporific headline, “Zohran Mamdani With Errol Louis: A Conversation on Public Safety.”
As for the government takeover of the energy industry, today, September 12, Mamdani tweeted out to his many social media followers a link from a Democratic Socialists of America faction called NYC-DSA Ecosocialists. “lower your bills with publicly-owned power,” Mamdani said. “we need a plan for 15 GW by 2030. Take urgent action below.” The “action” was to submit an astroturf (fake grassroots) style “public comment” urging the New York Power Authority to “build 15 GW of public renewable energy by 2030.”
As if to emphasize the point, Mamdani included a video clip of him from 2024 engaging in a call-and-response chant routine: “When I say ‘public,’ you say ‘power.’ Public! Power! Public! Power! Public! Power! Public! Power!”
The New York State Independent System Operator says summer peak demand in 2024 was 28,990 MW, or about 29 gigawatts. So 15 gigawatts would mean more than half of the state’s energy was coming from in-state government sources. The New York Power Authority, created by my Harvard Crimson president predecessor Franklin Roosevelt as governor of New York in 1931, already produces nearly a quarter of the state’s power, mainly from dams such as one near Niagara Falls, but even that authority acknowledged, “Many commenters in the hearings and in written comments expressed concern that NYPA might crowd out private investment in New York’s renewable energy evolution.”
The national platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member and of which the “NYC-DSA Ecosocialists” are a faction, says, “We call for the nationalization of businesses like railroads, utilities, and critical manufacturing and technology companies, alongside regulation of corporate, communications, data, and financial sectors. We seek to ensure social and worker control over these businesses….we fight for the abolition of capitalism…”
Your high school United States history class probably made FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification seem benevolent, but it’s worth recalling that entire towns were destroyed and hundreds of families involuntarily relocated during intentional flooding for that project. Another example of a government-owned power generating plant was the Soviet Communist one that spawned the deadly disaster at Chernobyl.
The New York Times news pages insist, “The closest Mr. Mamdani gets to socialism is in his belief in treating people more equitably.” It’s almost comical. I have theories about what is happening inside the Times—simmering class resentments, support for Mamdani’s anti-Israel agenda expressing itself in the form of gushy overall coverage—but I will save those for another time. A bigger story than the media failure is the risk that a socialist who wants to boycott Israel and arrest its prime minister is a leading candidate to take over as mayor of America’s largest city.
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Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses describes in detail the many externalities of his otherwise masterful projects. Perhaps main stream media should be required to add a “black box” warning to these stories. “The potential negative externalities of the candidate’s proposals are not addressed in this article.”
Regarding the shortcomings of the TVA, it bears also to keep in mind that the Agency "became the country's worst emitter of sulfur dioxide, opposed black-lung and mine safety laws, took an uncritical view of nuclear power, displaced the Cherokees, and warred against pollution laws....even in the 1930s , 'grassroots democracy' often meant deferring to entrenched interests in the region, especially powerful white landowners," to quote liberal historian William E. Leuchtenburg ("The FDR Years" p. 160). As to the eviction of farm families and the flooding of their land, there is a little known but quite good movie on the subject, Elia Kazan's "Wild River" with Montgomery Clift, Jo Van Fleet and Lee Remick which shows up on TCM from time to time.