Mamdani to Big Money NYers: You’ll Be Happy to Pay For a Better Big Apple, or Something

I’ve seen this movie before, and … it doesn’t end well. 

Yesterday morning. MSNBC/MSNOW(?)’s Al Sharpton offered up a few softballs to fellow socialist Zohran Mamdani, who’s been trying to claim lately that he’s grown since his radical phase of, er … four or five years ago. Mamdani rolled out a plan to hike taxes on the city’s highest earners. 

Even Sharpton seemed a bit curious as to how Mamdani would sell that. Mamdani tried to claim that taking more of their money would make their lives improve, or something (via Twitchy):

Delusional! Zohran Mamdani tells MSNBC he would try to convince NYC’s top earners to stay “in part by showing them that asking them to pay more in taxes would increase even their quality of life.” pic.twitter.com/lFqijdAz25

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) September 8, 2025

I wonder how the kulaks felt about that when Stalin tried uplift through confiscation. Maybe if he hadn’t killed a few million through intentional famine, we’d know. 

Harsh? Yeah, probably. I’d perhaps go softer, except that I lived through the “happy to pay for a better Minnesota” era — literally. Democrats (called DFL in that state) counterintuitively ran on the argument that Minnesota needed more “investment” to increase its standard of living in the late 1990s/early 2000s. They proposed large-scale public-works projects, expansion of social programs, and especially to pour more money into education to improve outcomes. To do this, they planned to get more revenue (taxes) from higher-earning households by increasing income and property taxes.

Needless to say, this isn’t an easy sell, so they created the “happy to pay for a better Minnesota” campaign. This even included bumper stickers, which at the time I suggested served a dual purpose as a signal to con artists as to where their next sap could be found. The most amusing part of the campaign came when a friend of ours, whose car sported that bumper sticker, left for a red state because … taxes had become too high in Minnesota. 

How much did the quality of life improve in Minnesota? Not enough to keep our friend in the state, or others as well. Did education improve? Well, as the data shows, not really. For instance, in 1998 — our first full year of living in the state — 67% of 4th graders read at age level, and 35% were proficient. In 2024, those numbers were 61% and 31%. At the eighth grade, the numbers were 78% and 38% in 1998, and 71% and 28% in 2024. The math numbers did improve a bit for 4th-graders over that period, but among eighth graders, they went from 80% and 40% in 2000 to 71% and 34% in 2024. 

And of course, DFL leadership led to the bungled George Floyd riots, the destruction of Minneapolis’ core, birthed the “defund the police” movement, and so on. Tim Walz used the power of the state to set up Stasi-esque snitch lines to enforce his paranoid pandemic shutdowns well after all of the scientific data showed they were unnecessary. Minneapolis is returning to its Murderopolis days. 

So much for a better Minneapolis!

The obstacle to “quality of life” improvements in Democrat-controlled jurisdictions is not tax revenue. It is progressive governance. Mamdani will make those measures worse no matter how much money he can manage to “redistribute” to the proletariat. America’s urban cores have been in steep decline in large part because Mamdani and his fellow radicals have controlled urban policy for decades. 

If New York City voters want a better quality of life, they have two choices. Either they need to stop electing progressives to run their city, or they need to show their “happy to pay for a better Big Apple” bumper stickers on the highway away from NYC. The high-end earners will do just that, because capital always flees first from bad governance, while the rest of the benighted voters who supported Mamdani will get stuck with decay and decline for another four years … until the next huckster promising Other People’s Money comes along. 

Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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