I'll throw in extending parental coverage to 26. I have a sibling with type 1 diabetes and it's impossible for me to describe the positive impact those two provisions have had on their life.

Just because a piece of a legislation includes painful compromises doesn't mean we should ignore its huge wins.

Obama care was not a Democratic win it was another Republican win in a long list of Republican wins, where the dems tried to work with the republicans in good faith and implemented their policies for them. Sadly they realised to late that you should never work with right wing fascists because if you give those people your hand they will take the whole arm.

Absolutely. We have this bad habit of hating policies and politicians that make things 10% as good at they tried to do, but shrugging and ignoring politicians and policies that actively make our lives worse. Perfect is ideal. Better than we started with is still better.

True (*)

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.

Isn't it the same thing that made it unaffordable?

No that is a huge failure. That is perhaps the biggest failure of Obamacare.

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.

Times are changing. The pendulum swing back from MAGA is going to be interesting.

Manchin and Sinema shouldn't be mentioned together in the same sentence.

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.

I think people had rose colored glasses about Obama because he was, by far, the most charismatic President we've had in modern times. His speeches still give me goose bumps, even when I disagree with what he's saying! That man has the gift of gab. Him also being intelligent further, sadly, makes him an outlier in modern times.

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.

With 20/20 hindsight I'd say that's the wrong lesson. The actual lesson is that if you're struggling to get 40% of the legislature to make obvious improvements to your country, you should use your majority for even more radical things. If they'd used that same majority to pack the supreme court, pass a nationwide anti-gerrymandering law, break up hundreds of large corporations, and so on, we might have averted a ton of disaster. At the time perhaps it was hard to see, but in retrospect what we saw in the period 2008-2010 were early warning signs of how the flaws in our system of government were going to send us on a downward spiral.

> ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.

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.

> ACA was the most radical package that could have passed

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.

I do think it's worth considering that FDR got elected for 4 terms (granted, congressional control went through various flows).

The push for the ideal might have locked in something generational. Maybe.

> ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.

Bad casual reasoning. There is so little evidence that voters care about policies years before they go into effect.

> The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.

This is the essence of politics.

No. I think an honest attempt at doing something "radical" economically for the working class can cross the divides we have.

The ACA was essentially the Republican plan for healthcare reform. They just went scorched earth on it because they were pissy that he got the credit for their plan. That's also why they haven't been able to come up with a coherent replacement.

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.

> 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.

You are right in a deep way (as you often are on this site). Wins Against Replacement isn't something most people can comprehend. If you look at baseball, you'll see that a lot of what they're doing with what they think is advanced moneyball would seem like normal statistical techniques to anyone. But then you realize that what is trivial in an HFT firm is kind of black magic to anyone else. Even WAR is beyond the comprehension of the average person.

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 line of thinking died the moment that the parties began another realignment with 2024. We are in the beginnings of the 7th party system.

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.

There are plenty of instances in which Obama, despite campaigning on a platform of change from Bush-era policies, continued or even furthered those policies. A good example which is relevant here involves government surveillance:

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.

Consider the framing today: "Trump is doing all these terrible things, making all of these drastic changes, exploiting the system to his will."

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.

The u-turn came long before that acronym existed, as I remember it. The Dems had been trying to build consensus for some kind of single payer plan for almost twenty years by that point, and practically the first thing Obama said after being elected was that as a show of good faith he would take single payer was off the table.

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.

Obama was pretty timid. Especially at the beginning of his presidency he assumed that his fellow democrats like Lieberman and Baucus were rational and wanted the best for the country and not just being pawns for the insurance industry. I bet if he had pounded the table, he would have way more success. Heck, LBJ made senators cry to get things done.

Why would someone do that? Especially for presidency which is the final stage of their career? They're not beholden to or reliant on anyone no more so shouldn't have to be swayed by any adverse interests.

Bill Kristol has come a long way! He would vote for Mamdani...over Cuomo and Sliwa anyway.

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://youtu.be/rRSZiWwiBuE

Interestingly, the ACA can trace its roots to the Republican counter proposal to Hillarycare written by the Heritage Foundation of recent Project 2025 fame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor...

Rent freezes are such a bad idea that Mamdani himself implicitly admits as such by insisting they will be temporary with no justification as to why.

works in NYC but in swing states “zohran is a commie” will hum along nicely enough…

Despite his public persona, I read recently Obama is actually quite aloof and didnt have the patience to charm the politicians in person.

Obama took a mea culpa on parts of implementation, namely the federal marketplace website (they weren’t expected as many states to opt out of the marketplace) and the “keep your plan” narrative.

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)

> where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed

Sure. Broadly. But there is one correct answer a mayoral candidate could give on such an issue, and it’s the one Mamdani gave.

It's so depressing that the entire Mamdani debate has become mired in Israeli politics. You can completely ignore the issue, and still have plenty of questionable stuff to talk about.

He has repeatedly talked about defunding the police. Literally, not figuratively, and not that long ago.

He said he wanted to close down Rikers Island. He said that prisons are unnecessary. He said he wants to empty jails. 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.

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...

Here's him talking about it for those that want to form their own opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggV2SeiGrVw

1) "intifada" has not historically meant "peaceful resistance". It has referred to events like October 7th, and the 1st and 2nd intifadas which killed more people than the Troubles did in about 1/3rd as much time, etc.

2) Also dumb shit like "queer liberation means defund the police" and "when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF"

Manifestly not - Cuomo ran as an independent, and a Republican did run.

When I lived in Pennsylvania, the state-run liquor stores had a monopoly on selling wine and liquor. This survived Republican and Democratic administrations for decades.

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.

State liquor stores are terrible, and I’ve never heard anyone say a nice word about on base grocery stores.

I would say that state-run liquor stores and subsidized city-run grocery stores such as what Mamdani proposes are not at all comparable. The former is a giant cash cow - a profit center while the latter is an entitlement program i.e a mandatory budget expense. To give an idea of the amount of money involved in state-run liquor stores, consider the state of New Hampshire's report from last year:

>"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...

Was going to say our state had government liquor stores until a couple of years ago. The sky remained in place.

Communism is literally when the government owns the means of production. Owning the means of distribution is not far from that at all.

Good point; still mathematically less than 60% if you trust AP's estimated remaining vote count.

So if minimum wage was $60 in a year you'll see a bread loaf for $900

You didn’t read your own link. The peak value of minimum wage was $12.12/hr in 1968 after adjusting for inflation.

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.

The reason state-run liquor stores make some sense is that we don't want to optimize alcohol sales. Neither on price nor volume. This is unlike groceries. The same reason state run monopoly on gambling makes sense but state run monopoly on car manufacturing doesn't.

11-13 isn’t anywhere near 60.

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.

>He has moderated on the police funding issue

So he already backtracked on a core election promise even before he got elected? Doesn’t bode well for his supporters expectations going forward.

>the rent freeze is for already rent controlled apartments.

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...

Please explain how city run grocery stores are middle of the road politics. Perhaps they’re middle of the road when your road is all the way to the left.

> CA took fast food min wage up to $20 and it’s been fine.

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).

>fine

A medium fries is over $4 before taxes… over $1 more expensive than the rest of the country.

What part?

(McDonald’s is still $17 an hour in Billings.)

Seattle has largely increased police funding, dramatically? For a dept under a consent decree until recently.

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

Why? They didn’t defund their police.

Seattle upset their police force and made them quit, they then had to pay overtime to fewer remaining officers which increased their spending.

There is minimal incentive for corruption in a hereditary aristocracy. Status is determined by birthright rather than accumulation of money. And if you are a lord and do need money, you have the power to tax it legally anyway. So what incentive is there to make or take a bribe? It won't change who your parents are.

It's a tradeoff between new ideas and operational effectiveness. Yes, there are benefits to rotating out a dynasty, but there are also benefits to keeping one.

A dynasty is only undemocratic if people aren't voting for them. If they are winning elections, it's still a democracy.

Based on what I saw in the debates, I'm sure there are lots of people in NYC more capable than anyone on the ballet.

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.

His policies around being soft on crime (do you know what NYC was like in the 90's? It's not some distant history), the free bus fare, the city owned grocery stores, the rent control, are all policies that many feel threaten the economic viability and safety of the city.

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 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.

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?

With drugs in the mix things get complicated. Many cities tried giving these people free homes/rooms but because drug laws were strictly enforced there the homeless chose to stay on the streets. You’re not going to get rid of the fentanyl and meth addicted homeless unless you do it by force.

How many times must it be explained that building luxury mansions still brings property prices down. Nobody ever voluntarily builds crappy low income housing. That’s never how development works. You let people build the new fancy buildings they want to build with all the margins and high prices. Then, when a bunch of rich people move in, that’s people that are no longer chasing all the other apartments. Eventually, way down the road, these swanky apartments will be tomorrow’s old and crappy ones in the neighborhood that’s not hip anymore, and low income people can rent them. This is how things actually work, and it’s fine.

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.

More housing, regardless of type, is directly correlated to cheaper average rents [0]. So Thiel is right in that regard, the red tape for construction and opposition from NIMBYs must be curtailed.

[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/733977

I mean thiels policies are in effect in Austin Texas which is one of the few jurisdictions seeing decreasing rents.

The market isn't going to function ideally in a place like New York.

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.

A huge chunk of the plan is converting unused office space into housing in Manhattan, mostly in neighborhoods that were already mostly commercial, so there's relatively little NIMBY pushback.

This is another example of a little radicalism is a dangerous thing. You don't need to be friends with landlords if you're prepared to simply seize all their property.

> 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

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...

I'm all for building more housing, but in places that already have an affordability problem, removing rent control before building more housing would just displace people overnight.

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.

It's kind of incredible how the obvious and true solution to rents being too high is to BUILD MORE HOUSES and yet somehow people manage to convince themselves that in fact, the real solution to rents being to high is to artificially cap their prices. Incredible stupidity.

Extra supply is helping, but I would argue back-to-office and layoffs are the primary culprit.

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 feel like economists (as the Krugman quote above seems to illustrate) don't consider the real world. Price controls aren't necessary when there's abundance. When housing supply meets (or slightly exceeds) demand, landlords don't jack up rents every year and displace tenants. When it doesn't, and can't, what do we do to keep people from losing their homes?

(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.)

There's also (relatively) strong renter protections, including effectively frozen rent.

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.

Have you lived in one of those rent controlled “paradises”? In Europe, yes, there are sizeable populations living in subsidized housing, and often there are restrictions on rent increases, but new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants. New tenants frantically overbidding each other, while old tenants pay pennies compared to today’s market prices, mmm, what a life.

“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.

The housing situation in Vienna has benefited significantly from massive population decline. As much as the population has grown in recent years, it is only now approaching the population it had a century ago.

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.

Democrats want higher wages for workers instead of reducing the cost of living (rent, insurance, etc).

Keeping a building rentable is a pretty reasonable criteria for… renting.

> The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them

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.)

(from wikipedia)

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

Two of these things are orthogonal to freezes on rent controlled units, so I don't understand your point here.

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.

No it doesn't. There are about 25,000 rent-controlled units, less than 1% of units in the City.

You are thinking of rent stabilization, but that's not close to the same thing.

Rent-controlled units account for less than 1%. Rent-stabilized units for less than 25%.

Politics is all about sides. To think it isn't is delusional.

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.

lol, going down according to who? https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york...

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.

Rent control increase the rent for everyone, lowers the amount of housing stock, and reduces its quality.

I'm not sure there are many countries that actually have free childcare and free buses. Talk about it, yes. Subsidized to a degree, yes. But pretty much every municipal transport is already heavily subsidized.

There are fundamental differences between Europe and the US. The US is not magically going to become Europe by electing a "left" mayor.

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.

Well Luxembourg is pretty much less a dense Staten Island, and they do more stuff than buses.

You can’t find another city that even approaches NYC without moving to another country. And moving to London or Paris to escape taxes doesn’t make a lot of sense.

As further evidence to OP’s point: people paint Mamdani as an extremist for discussing rent control but it’s already the law in NYC. It’s not even remotely new. And there were 0% increases (effectively freezes) in 2014-2016 and again during COVID in 2020.

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.

> Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy

Switzerland has had rent control for a long time, and seems to have (rather successfully) avoided this economic basket case fate.

Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy. It shouldn't even exist. If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter rather than using limited housing to extract profit, often without even improving the housing itself.

> 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.

Brutal to everyone. Society is a chain linked web, not a loose cluster.

Western Europe would have been collapsing right now if daddy cold capitalist didn't show up with gas and guns to drive away the Russian bear.

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.

Just don't commit blasphemy, which is literally a crime you can be charged with there.

NYC will rot if it continues down this path.

> The exception is Canada where mayoral candidates run an independent campaign.

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.

Most of the large city mayoral races in the U.S. are partisan. But I'm not sure how it breaks down by state in the U.S. for small towns.

Famously, the US founding fathers warned against the dangers of political parties, only to see them spring up in the US anyways. You really need to design your political system carefully so that there is no incentive to form political parties. I don't know if anyone has ever successfully done this. People should be thinking about it more though.

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.

In Canada's largest city the mayor is firmly and strongly associated with the NDP. "Chow served as the New Democratic Party member of Parliament for Trinity—Spadina from 2006 to 2014."

They don't behave like a political party any more. It's not just the business of politics as usual and a generational shift, it's something different. I've been trying to coin a term for this internal takeover - I think nihilocracy, or nihilocratic populism, is the best I've come up with.

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.

> You can always do these things but you still have no cultural 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?

They are pushing Turning Point USA chapters at thousands of schools in the US.

If NYC actually makes it easy to build there's practically infinity investment available. Sure dude, nobody will build >1M condos because you told them not to.

Trust only comes from building it. I think you're confusing cause and effect here. Norway has a higher trust society not because of who they are but because of how they treat one another.

mamdani, circa 2021

"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

If you're genuinely open to this conversation - the Soviet Union funded many of the world's labor movements, giving it varying amounts of influence on them. Influence which it sometimes used to spread talking points of its own choice and to its benefit. Democratic Socialists of America was born from a branch of one of these movements. This is more visible looking at DSA's foreign policy platform, where today they use virtually identical talking points to those the Soviet Union distributed to their partners back in the 60s and 70s.

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.