Socialist candidate for NYC mayor made a major financial miscalculation, says report
Muslim socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, has made a major accounting error that can affect his plan to establish government-owned food stores, according to a Washington Examiner report.
If elected, Mamdani has promised to distribute free food to New Yorkers through five city-owned grocery stores. To fund this, Mamdani said he will simply redistribute some of the taxpayer dollars that are currently funding the city’s Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, which supports certain private grocery stores in food deserts. The socialist boasted that he would only need to use half of the FRESH budget, which he said is $140 million.
“That should be compared to the city’s existing program called City FRESH, where they are set to spend $140 million, subsidizing corporate grocery stores . . . So we would take less than half of the money the city is already set to spend, and actually deliver results,” he said
But that figure is incorrect. Mamdani got it by misreading the city’s website.
Not nearly $140 million
In a graphic featured on New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) site, the city says $140 million is “the amount of money invested into NYC’s economy through FRESH.” In other words, that money was invested by private grocery stores, not taxpayer funds.
The Washington Examiner says that in reality, FRESH costs an average of $3.3 million annually. If Mamdani truly uses half of the FRESH budget to fund his socialist food distribution stores, it would take over 40 years.
Mamdani’s socialist platform
Establishing government-owned grocery stores is only part of Mamdani’s platform. The Uganda native, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has also promised free public transportation, frozen rent prices, universal childcare, medical mutilation for minors packaged as “gender-affirming care,” defunding the police, further taxing the rich, and taxing White people. In 2021, Mamdani expressed several other goals, including “seizing the means of production,” helping elect more socialists, and boycotting Israel.
Even if Mamdani loses the election in November, he has already made his mark by emboldening the socialist movement.
