Republicans are hysterical about Mamdani's victory in New York City's mayoral race and predict a meltdown for the city. But he will be a small threat to the city and none for the nation. Just look at what he has promised:
Affordable Housing: Freezing rent on rent-stabilized apartments and implementing city-wide rent freezes.
Public Transit: Making buses free and faster for all New Yorkers.
Economic Measures: Creating city-owned grocery stores in each borough and increasing the minimum wage to $30 by 2030.
Social Services: Implementing universal child care services.
Public Safety: Establishing a new Department of Community Safety to respond to certain emergencies with mental health care workers instead of police.
Compared to the promises of past socialists like Marx, Lenin and Mao, those are pretty lame! And they're lame because the U.S. is already the most socialist it has ever been. That will surprise and anger many because most Americans assume the U.S. is the guardian of capitalism in the world. But as late as 1990, no respectable economist referred to the U.S. as capitalist. At best, it was a mixed economy.
So why do people think the U.S. is capitalist? Because President Ronald Reagan championed capitalism in his speeches. So when he ended federal price controls on a few industries, the socialist media and historians began trumpeting the U.S. as a wild west, no-holds-barred, totally unregulated, capitalist system. The truth is that Jimmy Carter began ending price controls to reduce the price inflation and boost the stagnant economy of the 1970s. Reagan didn't deregulate anything. He merely ended price controls. The Federal Register of new regulations had been running 70,000 pages a year since 1970 and leaped to 100,000 pages in 2000. The media and historians lied. Imagine that.
The slide toward socialism began with the election of Woodrow Wilson over a century ago who established the Federal Reserve System (1913), the Federal Trade Commission, signed the Sixteenth Amendment that allowed a federal income tax and implemented "progressive" taxation. And he created the deep state, the federal bureaucracies that continue to promote socialism regardless of who is elected to Congress or the presidency. Wilson called himself a progressive, which was a polite word for socialist at the time.
Central planning and government control over markets and businesses are socialism. Wilson gave the Fed a monopoly on the money supply and the legal power to counterfeit money. It uses that power to centrally plan banking. Government regulation of the economy should be limited to punishing criminals who violate the rights to life, liberty or property of others. The FTC exercises far more control over businesses. The income tax amendment opened the gate for Congress to take more of the peoples' money, expand government and spend massive amounts of money, in other words, make the U.S. more socialist.
For most of the 19th century, Americans considered a progressive tax, one in which the rich pay a higher percent than others, to be immoral because they understood that the state should treat all citizens the same. Wilson ignored the morality and vented the country's pent up envy on the rich through higher taxes. The U.S. tax system is more "progressive" than that of Europe because most poor in the U.S. do not pay income taxes while most in Europe do.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the nation deeper into socialism with his creation of Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, a 40-hour work week, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Tennessee Valley Authority, increases in banking regulation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) to boost farm prices and reduce output.
Lyndon Johnson plunged us into the depths of socialism with his war to end poverty that included Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act providing federal funding for public schools, Civil Rights legislation that gave the government control over businesses' hiring practices, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Richard Nixon implemented price controls and took the U.S. off the gold standard, all socialist policies, though he claimed to be a Republican. Killing the gold standard allowed the Fed to counterfeit more money and launch the hyper inflation of the 1970s. Jimmy Carter created the U.S. Department of Education in 1979.
Ronald Reagan reduced the top tax rate from 70% to 28%, but by getting rid of many deductions increased taxes overall. His tax increase was the largest in U.S. history, followed by those of Herbert Bush and Bill Clinton, each the largest in history at the time. George Bush expanded Medicare coverage of prescription drugs. Today, federal and state governments take a larger bite of the U.S. economy than ever.
Americans complain about high healthcare insurance costs, but 85% of premiums go to pay hospitals and doctors. Those prices have increased to insane heights because for over a century the American Medical Association has bribed congressmen to give it a monopoly on the supply of healthcare. It has used that monopoly to create an artificial shortage of doctors and raise doctor pay, just as any good union would. A shortage of supply and virtually unlimited demand through Medicare and Medicaid equal rapidly rising prices, as any freshman in economics understands.
Previous presidents implemented the most democratic socialism they could. That's why Mamdani's promises seem so feeble.
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