The Stack: Rent Control and the Zohran Mamdani Experiment
Democratic Socialism isn’t new—but it’s making a comeback in America’s biggest cities. Todd Huff explores what happens when utopian promises meet real-world economics as New York City prepares for a Zohran Mamdani administration.
From rent freezes and city-run grocery stores to free childcare and a $30 minimum wage, Momdani’s platform reads like a socialist wish list. Todd breaks down why these policies—though emotionally appealing—don’t stand up to economic reality.
Price controls on rent have been tried before, from post-WWII housing caps to the gas lines of the 1970s. The results were always the same: shortages, disinvestment, and declining quality. Yet, the political allure of “free” remains strong.
Todd draws comparisons to historical failures and modern inflation trends, explaining how excessive government intervention erodes both opportunity and prosperity. With New York’s high costs and limited housing supply, rent control may bring temporary relief—but at a long-term price the city can’t afford.
As Todd reminds listeners: compassion without common sense isn’t sustainable policy.
🎧 Listen to Today’s Episode
📰 Stack Links
Trump at Senate GOP Breakfast Calls Once Again to Nuke the Filibuster and Push His Agenda Through
Trump Faces Rare Republican Pushback as He Presses Senate to Scrap the Filibuster
Zohran Mamdani Wins NYC Mayoral Race, Backed by Democratic Socialists of America
Progressive Upstart Mamdani Aims to Spoil Cuomo’s Comeback Bid
Sanders: Dems Have to Take Mamdani’s Message All Over This Country
Miranda Schubert Wins Tucson City Council Ward 6 Seat with DSA Support
One of Four Democratic Socialist Candidates Wins Missoula City Council Seat
Historical Price Controls in the United States (Brookings Analysis)
U.S. Department of Energy: History of the 1973–1981 Oil Crises
📝 Transcript: Rent Control and the Zohran Mamdani Experiment
The Todd Huff Show – November 6, 2025
Host: Todd Huff
Todd Huff: Oh, yes, my friends, we're going to talk about—well, the fascination that these leftists have with the Democratic Socialist movement. We've got some really dire times, my friends. That—well, stand by. Check, check. What happened? I bet that happened when it reset. In. Attention. You're listening to The Todd Huff Show, America’s home for conservative, not bitter talk and education.
Todd Huff: Be advised, the content of this program has been documented to prevent and even cure liberalism, and listening may cause you to lean to the right. And now, coming to you from the Full Suite Wealth studios, here’s your conservative but not bitter host, Todd Huff.
Todd Huff: Well, my friends, here in a few short months, the Democratic Socialists, as they say—which is insane, the way that people think about this stuff—but they're not going to have any more excuses. Their ideology is going to be in power in the city of New York when Zohran Mamdani takes office. And by the way, it’s not just Zohran Mamdani who has been a Democratic Socialist-backed candidate. There’s actually six of them that won nationwide.
Todd Huff: I don’t have all the names, but I do see Miranda Schubert—she was elected to the Tucson City Council in Ward 6. A candidate was elected to the Missoula, Montana City Council. There’s others as well. So we’re going to see, we’re going to see what happens. And hear me say this—I said this yesterday—there is a 0% chance. Zero. I’m not even saying 0.1%. And I’m a guy who thinks in probabilities. I’m a guy who always sees things that are—well, things that are possible, unless, of course, they’re just humanly impossible. And that’s the problem here.
Todd Huff: This ideology is humanly impossible to work, and we’re going to unpack this today. We’re going to talk about some of the things that they want to do as Democratic—so-called Democratic—Socialists, which, again, basically just means if you can get half the country or half the city, in the case of New York, to vote to take away the property and rights of another person, I guess you’re good. I guess that’s how that’s supposed to work.
Todd Huff: This, by the way, also illustrates and demonstrates the problems of something that’s strictly democratic. That’s why our founders were brilliant when they decided that they were going to have a constitutional republic that had protections built in—that had the smallest minority in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights and put that into the U.S. Constitution. It said even if everyone else says that you don’t have one of these rights, you do. Right? The right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, whatever the case may be.
Todd Huff: Thankfully, our founders had the foresight and the insight to realize what is happening today is exactly the sort of thing that happens in nations throughout history. And, of course, history repeats itself, as always. All right, so that’s where we’re headed today. I want to talk about these Democratic Socialists. I want to talk specifically about Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral platform, talk about some of the things he’s promised, talk about the delusional worldview that is necessary for people to flock to this sort of thing.
Todd Huff: We’re also going to look at some price controls, because one of the things that Zohran Mamdani wants to do is have rent control—controls on rent prices, capping them and so forth. People love this. It sounds good. It sounds like, “Hey, someone cares about me. They’re going to make things more affordable.” It’s crazy to me what people think government can do, because historically there have been a whole lot of unintended consequences. If you look at it—if you take people at their word, “unintended consequences.” If you decide to take the more skeptical approach, you might say that they’re completely intended consequences—to acquire more power for those in charge, and so forth.
Todd Huff: Anyway, we’ll get into those things as well. And, time permitting, we’ll talk a little bit about the filibuster in the Senate. Trump’s out there calling for the end of it so that the government can reopen. Senator John Thune—I did the Todd Talk on this, so I’m probably not going to get to this. If you just want to check out the Todd Talk on the website, or you can always get the Todd Talk when you subscribe to our free email newsletter called “The Inner Circle”—toddhuffshow.com. You can sign up there to get that.
Todd Huff: All right, my friends, that is where we’re headed. But let’s be honest as we get rocking and rolling here today—when your financial world starts getting a little more complicated, you need more than a one-size-fits-all approach.
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Todd Huff (Sponsor Read): By the way, this is the type of legacy that the lunatics surrounding Zohran Mamdani—the people that vote for Zohran Mamdani—want to do away with. They don’t want you to have enough wealth to secure your legacy. They don’t want you to do that. They don’t want you to build it. They don’t want you to secure it. They want to take it. And, friends, that’s why this sort of thing may be more important than ever.
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Todd Huff: All right, having a little problem with the voice today. I think we’ll be okay. But it’s this time of year—just, if you’ve listened to the program, I struggle this time of year. I found out, I found a little trick that helped me the first time this hit me this year. I’m going to see if it’ll help me again. We’ll see.
Todd Huff: I’m not bad, but there have been times my voice has been absolutely horrific on this program, and that’s a problem. We’re going to try to avoid that for your sake and for mine, but let’s get to this.
Todd Huff: Just really quickly, Democratic Socialists of America—they won six elections. Now, these are candidates that were endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America. Of course, I mentioned Zohran Mamdani, I mentioned the name Miranda Schubert—elected to Tucson City Council, Ward 6. I mentioned another individual who was elected to the Missoula, Montana City Council. And national coverage—news out there—reports that at least six Democratic Socialist of America–endorsed candidates have secured offices across this great nation.
Todd Huff: Now, that’s six more than ever should secure an office. These people have wild ideas. They have antiquated ideas that have—well, have been dismantled, have not worked, have caused tremendous havoc on people around the planet who have been subjected to political leaders who enforce these ideas. But they’re winning offices. They’re winning elections. And that’s not many—I understand, six out of everything that’s going on in this country—but I do know this: I do know this, that this is not the direction—even to have one of these lunatics winning an office, whatever they run for, dog catcher for that matter—it makes no difference to me.
Todd Huff: They should not. The people electing them should have the sense not to vote for these lunatics and clowns. And we’ll kind of get a better understanding of that as I break down Zohran Mamdani’s platform.
Todd Huff: So, Mamdani’s platform includes these things—and I’ll list them first, and then we’ll go through them. Number one: housing and rent—that’s one of the issues that we’ll talk about. The cost of living—that’s in there. Revenue and taxation, for, of course, the city of New York. Transportation and climate, of course. Social and immigration policy—those are the things I want to talk about.
Todd Huff: I want to start by talking about rent—housing and rent. So Zohran Mamdani wants to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments. Now, I live out here in flyover country. I’m in the heartland. I’m out here in a little bit—I mean, small-town USA, right? And it’s different, obviously. I’ve been to New York City once, and I was just there for the day. But even seeing it once, you get a little bit of a glimpse into—first of all, it’s a spectacular city.
Todd Huff: It is. I have to tell you, there’s a couple of places I was unsure that I would like traveling to. One of those was Las Vegas, another of those was New York City. And I have to tell you that I liked both of them. Both of them have things to offer. Now, of course, you go to Vegas—I’m not saying the “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” I’m not endorsing that garbage. What I am saying is that there was a lot more there. I was a lot more impressed with that. I’m not a gambler.
Todd Huff: The buildings are incredible. It’s just kind of a neat place. Obviously, you could get into a ton of trouble. There’s a lot of bad things that happen there. But you can go see shows and just take in some of the scenery. It’s not far from the Grand Canyon and other national parks. A buddy and I once went to Vegas and spent a day going to Death Valley National Park, which is a couple of hours away as well. So there’s things there that are interesting and that you can do. And Hoover Dam is not far from there.
Todd Huff: New York City—I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I went there. Again, just a guy that was raised in small-town USA. I had flown into D.C. for some event there. I’m trying to remember who the event was with—I’m drawing a blank on the name—but anyway, this was years ago. This was back maybe before Trump won the—maybe it was 2016, I’m not sure, maybe 2018, something like that. But I remember I took the train. So I flew into DCA, Reagan National Airport. I took the Amtrak train from D.C. to New York City, and then I flew out of LaGuardia, back to home base here in Indianapolis.
Todd Huff: And I remember—I will never forget—it was dark, it was nighttime when I first came into the city on the train. And I remember I was in New Jersey. By the way, that train moves at an incredible clip—it was going, I want to say, 120 miles an hour anyway—but I was looking out the window, and suddenly I saw Freedom Tower. And I have to tell you that upon seeing that, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know I would even be able to see it from the way I was traveling in, but it hit me like a ton of bricks, and immediately I teared up because, of course, what happened there on 9/11.
Todd Huff: I was many miles away, on the other side of the river anyway, but it was tremendous—it’s a tremendous place to be. And you get a glimpse—I try to relate to people, right? I remember when I was in college, I had a friend who was from Compton. He actually came and visited with me over spring break. He had never been to a place like where I live—especially when you get out into the more rural parts of the community.
Todd Huff: And I remember him asking me, “Todd, where are all the lights?” And I said, “Well, there’s one over there.” You could see a dusk-to-dawn light, some security light on the horizon in the distance, but it’s very dark. And it didn’t hit me until I visited him years later in his hometown, when he and his wife were getting married. Oz and I attended that, and I remember being there and realizing—he didn’t ever really see darkness like I did in the country, because the city was constantly glowing.
Todd Huff: You couldn’t see the stars. Now, there’s places that you can see the stars much better than here. But the way that we can see them here versus the way he could see them there—it was nothing close to the same thing. And just by having those, you begin—those experiences begin to highlight just some of the differences. Sometimes these differences might seem insignificant, but you begin to pile them up, and you begin to think about New York City and just trying to find space, trying to find a place to have some quiet, trying to find someplace outside of Central Park where you can see some greenery.
Todd Huff: Oz just went here a few weeks ago with our sister-in-law. And just seeing it helps you understand just a glimpse into some of the thinking. And I know, listen—the founders knew this too. When you have big cities, you typically have people that are looking to the government for more and more things because they have more and more interactions with people.
Todd Huff: It’s one of the reasons why they vote bluer—because they think, “I want someone that’s going to do more, promise more.” And, of course, Democrats are all about promising everything in the world. In fact, Zohran Mamdani, as I played yesterday, said that there’s no problem too big for government, or no concern too small for it to care about, which is wild and wacky stuff to a guy like me.
Todd Huff: You get out into rural communities, you get out into flyover country, you get out into the Midwest and other parts of the country where we spend our efforts trying to figure out how to take care of ourselves. Again, I’m really not trying to be critical here—I’m just simply pointing out the differences. But you go to New York City or these big cities where you’re just one of many. It feels like you’re inundated. You don’t have your own space. You rely on people for a lot more than, say, a farmer in my community does, who—if his equipment goes down, he’ll try to fix it, oftentimes successfully fix it himself.
Todd Huff: And it’s just interesting—the mindset there is so different because of realities, because of expectations, because of the sheer number of people that are there. They want more rules. And, of course, the Democrats will comply with that all day because there’s nothing they love more—especially these so-called Democratic Socialists—than rules and promises.
Todd Huff: And you build upon that and you start with that, and you've got these leftist liberals running around on college campuses or who have graduated from some of these leftist universities who have studied this, right? And they think the only thing stopping these programs from working are, of course, some conservative policy or some budget cut.
Todd Huff: “If only the conservatives would get out of our way,” they say, “we could solve everybody’s problems.” Zohran Mamdani is out there saying basically that very thing. And so you've got this scenario—they've dealt with, New York City has dealt with, some Democrat mayors who haven't gotten the job done.
Todd Huff: And so instead of turning to someone with a different ideology, they say, “Let’s find someone who’s even willing to turn it up more.” And become more of a central planner than we had with the previous administration. I mean, it’s crazy to think that many conservatives, many Republicans were rooting for Andrew Cuomo to win the race, given Andrew Cuomo’s record as well.
Todd Huff: But at least he's not a radical, unhinged socialist. This is going to cause havoc. This is going to cause real, real problems in many, many ways for the citizens of New York City, for those who stay. In fact, many people are not going to put up with this, and I don’t blame them. But let's go through these.
Todd Huff: Let’s go through these specifically—housing and rent. So freezing rent on rent-stabilized apartments. So imagine—and this is kind of, I know many of you have been to New York City, maybe some of you have not. Like I said, I’ve only been there once, but if you fly over the city, I remember leaving the city, I had some remarkable pictures as we departed from LaGuardia. And it's just amazing—other than Central Park, you have a really hard time seeing any greenery on the ground.
Todd Huff: If you’re familiar with the song New York, concrete jungle, right? Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, I guess—but there's tons of people, tons of opportunity, tons of energy. But it’s all just kind of right there, right? It’s hard to build in new areas. I mean, you’ve got to go outside of the city, you’ve got to go far outside of the city to find land that hasn’t been developed.
Todd Huff: And it’s hard. How do you build more housing? What does the city do? And so there’s a problem with affordability. But what’s interesting is the problems that we have with affordability are based on a couple of things. We still haven’t recovered from what we have endured since COVID under Bidenomics. We have not recovered from that.
Todd Huff: By the way, Trump has stopped—well, Trump has slowed the inflation significantly. This is a fact, by the way. The Republicans, since taking over, inflation has dramatically decreased. It’s still a little high. It’s still about 3%. We should be aiming for a little bit lower. Of course, I don’t want to get into the whole discussion of inflation.
Todd Huff: Inflation—I will say this though: inflation today means, in a common sense, I guess, in the common vernacular, that prices are going up. But inflation is a specific reason that prices go up. Inflation means that prices are going up because the government is producing too much money, which makes your dollars that you currently have worth less—not completely worthless, although we head in that direction when Biden’s in office—but it makes it worth less, not 100% worthless.
Todd Huff: And so it waters it down so your dollar actually has less buying power. And so prices increase—not because of the supply and demand issue, or there's a problem in a particular industry or whatever—this is across the board. Everything gets more expensive because the dollars that we’re buying with are not as powerful. So you need more of them.
Todd Huff: And so this is a phenomenon created when the government, the federal government specifically—I’ve gone through this. You can look at Milton Friedman explain this; maybe I’ll put a link of that on the site today too—but Milton Friedman explains inflation is caused solely by the federal government.
Todd Huff: It’s not caused by other countries. It’s not caused by state governments. It’s not caused by trade unions. It’s not caused by greedy business owners. It’s caused by the federal government because they produce too much currency. Too much currency—more currency has been created than real value has been created in the economy.
Todd Huff: And so the dollar just represents the real value that has been created, but if you produce, say, a billion dollars—I’m just picking random numbers for the sake of explanation—if you produce a billion dollars of real value, but you produce $1.5 billion or $1.2 billion in cash or in currency, then you can see that things quickly get out of whack.
Todd Huff: Markets will seek an equilibrium; these things will find themselves out. But there are other reasons besides inflation that things go up, and oftentimes they go up because of these very people who promise us to be doing good things on our behalf for the economy.
Todd Huff: They’re going to make things more affordable by interfering with the free market—taking money out of the free market in the form of taxation, and saying somehow that that’s good. Somehow that’s good for the overall economy and affordability. But the truth is, the more that governments mess with this stuff, the less it actually ever works.
Todd Huff: It never works, actually. That’s why I said there’s a 0% chance of this working. But I’ve got to take a break here, my friends, getting near the end of the first segment.
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Todd Huff: My friends, all right, so price controls have been done before in this country, and they’ve never ended well. They’ve never ended well. Now, I understand at the most superficial level possible that it sounds good to hear a politician say, “I’m going to make things more affordable for you.” You could say Trump— I mean, Trump said these things, right?
Todd Huff: So there’s a difference—there is a difference between the stated objective, well, not so much between the stated objectives but the means by which we get there. So if the government just says to you, if a politician just says to you, “I’m going to just limit how much someone can charge you for something,” that sounds great—especially, again, if it’s something like fuel, gasoline, fuel, groceries, these staples, these things that we have to have—housing.
Todd Huff: The problem is that that’s not the way that it works. I’ve often said when talking about these things—it’s incredible to me how naïve people are, how much they really believe government can truly do. Government is made up of people like you and me. It’s made up of regular people. In fact, it’s made up of people who are living in an environment where they don’t have any competition, so there’s no external force that is forcing them or causing them to be better at what they do.
Todd Huff: In fact, there’s actually built-in bonuses if they don’t do what they say they can do in many cases, because they’ll blame somebody else. They’ll say, “I don’t have enough money to do what I needed to do. I just need more time. Vote for me again.” And this works for people—it really does.
Todd Huff: It is an unbelievable thing to me. I shared the anecdote before—I remember reading this years ago. I’ve not been able to find this online, but I remember talking about this. I don’t know if it was in a class, if it was just in my own research, but I remember hearing the story of people in the gulags in the Soviet Union, back when Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union.
Todd Huff: And these people were put in the gulags ultimately because of the will of Joseph Stalin. He put those people there. But these people would still sing his praises, in many instances, as they were locked in these gulags because of the promises and the words that they heard this guy speak.
Todd Huff: And since he said things that sounded good, they couldn’t, in their mind, reconcile the idea that he put us here, yet he says other things. He says things that sound so utopian and wonderful. But yet he did things that led to the imprisonment, the torture, and the death of millions of people—millions. Over 20 million people died.
Todd Huff: If you factor in those who were imprisoned, tortured, put into work camps, and all that sort of thing—I mean, it is millions and millions and millions of people. And some of these people would still sing his praises. Why? This is what some people struggle with—they can’t see the difference between what people say and what they do.
Todd Huff: I’ve heard people say—look, when I was a kid, I remember reading a book of quotes, and one of the quotes said, “What you do speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you’re saying.” That’s a much better approach to deal with these sorts of people, to deal with politicians.
Todd Huff: I don’t care about your promises on the campaign trail. I care about what can be done, what you can do—and you can’t do these things. And so he’s promising to control rent, but it sounds so great. These Democrats who have voted for this guy love this idea because the city is expensive. But why is it expensive?
Todd Huff: It’s expensive for many reasons. One is the incredible inflation we had dating back to the days of—well, the COVID years, and of course, the subsequent recovery. What our government did, and we’re still paying the price for that today. It’s been slowed tremendously by Trump, but just because the rate has been slowed, it doesn’t mean that we recovered what we lost in the form of inflation when it was hitting us the hardest back three or four years ago.
Todd Huff: So that’s a part of it. There’s a limit—a limit of, where do you put the new housing? It’s hard to get new housing. It’s hard to get new developments, at least in the heart of that city. And so it gets tricky for people. Supply and demand plays a real thing. You’ve got to factor in the cost, all the regulations, and all the red tape in New York City leads to tremendous increases in costs as well.
Todd Huff: So Mamdani says, “I’m just going to come in and wave my magic wand and say rents are going to be controlled.” Well, what’s going to happen? Let’s look historically at what’s happened.
Todd Huff: 1942, here in this country, under the Office of Price Administration—that was actually a thing back in the ’40s, back in the days following the Great Depression, the early days of World War II—this Office of Price Administration maintained low rents in the short term because they capped them. They put a limit on them. But this led to housing shortages and reduced maintenance.
Todd Huff: Now, why does it do that? It’s obvious. It’s obvious for people who think about these things in kind of a sequential, step-by-step thing. The government comes in and says, “You can’t charge more for someone to rent your space,” and so if you’re a tenant—or, excuse me, a landlord—you’re going to say, “Okay, I have to make money or I can’t have the building. I can’t have the apartment, the house, whatever it is that I’m renting.”
Todd Huff: And so I either have to reduce the services, the repairs, the maintenance that I do, or people that are investors are going to stop buying these homes, stop building new developments—when that’s, of course, possible and there’s not space limitations and that sort of thing. So you have less new housing on the market for renters, and it leads to a shortage.
Todd Huff: This is an obvious consequence. Of course, your rents will come down, but the quality of the rental will decrease, and ultimately there will be fewer rentals—which, of course, in a market-driven economy should cause prices to go up even more.
Todd Huff: It puts more strain on the landlords. Of course, the government will try to put more requirements on the landlords, and this can’t end well. You can’t argue with math. You can, I guess, but it’s an effort in futility.
Todd Huff: So that’s what happens. New York City example—long-term decline in available rental housing and disinvestment in older buildings. I mean, that’s what happens. That’s where this is headed. Of all the things that we would predict on this show, this is perhaps the easiest.
Todd Huff: The likelihood—if he goes through with this and there’s nothing that stops him from these rent controls—this is absolutely where this will end up. It can go no other place. It can go no other place.
Todd Huff: In the 1970s, there were gasoline and energy controls. There were federal caps on oil and gas prices under both President Nixon and President Jimmy Carter. This, of course, led to fuel shortages. If you were alive in those days and were old enough to remember, you remember gas lines. You might remember a time in American history where you could only go to the pumps—
Todd Huff: —I forget exactly how this was—if your last name ended with a letter between A and M in the alphabet, you could go to the gas station, say, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If it ended in an N through Z—it’s something very close to that—you could go Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and it was closed on Sunday. This was how they were rationing fuel.
Todd Huff: There were fuel lines. Imagine if you were traveling. What if you were traveling across the country? You had to pull over to get gasoline—“I can’t get it today; I gotta wait until tomorrow.” It’s wild, wild stuff, but that’s what happened.
Todd Huff: Now, what ultimately happened—how did those end? Well, Reagan came along, lifted the controls in 1981, and that ended the rationing. That ended the shortages. Supply and demand then leveled out, and we got out of that mess.
Todd Huff: There’s more as well—food and consumer goods were rationed or, I guess, controlled pricing in the—really want to talk about—I’m going to have to wait until after the break—wage and healthcare controls in the 1940s and ’70s have changed the way that our compensation is with employers. I’ll get to those things after the break, my friends.
Todd Huff: But these things never work. They always have unintended consequences, and it always wreaks havoc on the people it promises to help. Quick timeout here on my end. Back in just a minute.
Todd Huff: Welcome back, my friends, third and final segment of this episode of The Todd Huff Show. I know, it’s tough—we’ll be back again tomorrow on Friday. But if you miss any episodes, you can always catch up with those on our website, toddhuffshow.com. It’s a good place to go. Subscribe to the newsletter for free as well if you want more content. Who, of course, would not? I don’t know who that person is.
Todd Huff: But before the break, I was telling you about one other thing that happened back in the post–World War II days—wage controls were issued in the United States of America. And what happened is, this is when you had the beginnings of employers begin offering other benefits to workers because they couldn’t pay them any more money.
Todd Huff: They couldn’t pay them higher wages, and so they started offering insurance benefits, which now, of course, you look at what—you just look at what happened to health insurance. I mean, that’s its own discussion that could go on for hours and hours, but there’s consequences.
Todd Huff: The free market—people always look for a way around the limitation. They always do. And if there isn’t a way around, then there are consequences. And if you control rent, you’re going to limit the new development. Now, Mamdani says, “Look, I’ll just pay for more; we’ll just invest in more.” But the reality is, there will be less new investment, which will be less housing, which will lead ultimately—once price controls are inevitably lifted because it’s going to wreak havoc on the city—prices are going to go up even more.
Todd Huff: This is what happens. But the low-information voter either doesn’t want to believe this, doesn’t understand this, or is too busy lecturing people on this side of the aisle about things, too angry to see it—just believes the rhetoric, whatever the case may be. And so they’re headed down this path.
Todd Huff: New York City is going to suffer tremendously, my friends. And, by the way, anybody who elects these folks who have the slightest bit of authority or power are going to deal with some tremendous consequences.
Todd Huff: More things in Mamdani’s platform that he’s promised the citizens of New York City that I’ll get to here in the time we have remaining—in just a moment.
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Todd Huff: All right—a couple of other things in the couple of minutes I have remaining regarding the promises made by Zohran Mamdani to his voters in the city of New York. Well, to all people, of course.
Todd Huff: He promises free childcare for children between the ages of six weeks and five years old—free childcare for children six weeks to five years. He promises city-run grocery stores—that’s one city-run grocery store per borough. There’s five boroughs in New York City.
Todd Huff: He promises to eliminate bus fares—in fact, I think it’s, what was it, “free and fast bus service” or some such thing is what he’s promised. He’s promised to raise—buckle up for this—raise the minimum wage, which I believe right now, I think I read in New York City, is $16 an hour. Can you check that real quick, Oz?
Todd Huff: Minimum wage in New York City—I think it’s $16 an hour. He’s effectively going to double that. Not quite, but basically double that by 2030. That’s just a little over four years away. We’re at the end of 2025. He’s going to raise it, he says, to $30 an hour.
Todd Huff: Sixteen? I was off by fifty cents—so not quite doubling it, but very close to doubling it. I just think, why don’t they promise to—well, I guess I say this, Biden promised to end—remember, Biden promised he was going to end cancer in his first term. Didn’t happen.
Todd Huff: I think it’s sick to do this. You give people hope who still believe in government, who still trust politicians for reasons I can’t fully explain. I think a lot of times if you’re desperate, you’re hoping that against all odds that something will help solve your problem, whatever it is that you’re dealing with—but these things are just ridiculous.
Todd Huff: The idea that this is not going to have an impact on the city is crazy. Not only that—2% income tax on earnings above a million dollars. He wants to raise the corporate tax rate to fund these new programs. Again, they’ve never met a tax they didn’t like.
Todd Huff: He wants to invest in “green schools.” Of course, he wants to expand public transit, the bike infrastructure—of course, to save the planet from evil conservatives and people who drive SUVs. And he wants to have legal representation for, well, illegal aliens—basically, he wants to make New York City, I guess, a stronger sanctuary city.
Todd Huff: We’ve got wild times out there, my friends. Wild times. These are expensive—I don’t know why they just don’t say, “We’re going to outlaw death and suffering.” And there are people that would say, “That sounds great, why haven’t we tried this before? Why didn’t we put that on a piece of paper?”
Todd Huff: “We’re going to outlaw death,” as though that’s going to somehow solve the problem. But for some people, my friends, they believe this stuff. It is wild to me. This is not going to work. It’s going to be massively expensive. But I’ve got to run. SDG.
