The Mamdani Dodge

A shilling for Madge Thatcher! The Prime Ministress’s prognosis on socialism once again proves prescient. And not just in the Blighty but a hop over the pond in the Big Bagel.

April is the cruelest month for new administrations. The honeymoon ends with winter thawing. Voters are only so forgiving. Fail to fill up their pockets and *swish.* Favor bends, whiplashes, doubles back. The grace period hits its period.

Gotham Mayor Zohran Mamdani is learning just how far the promise of new goodies goes. The toney soci ran on a charity platform: the dirty masses would no longer suffer in privation. All would be made free! Milk, honey, buses, childcare, jamming an icepick into your landlord’s skull for even considering upping the rent by a cent. All that was needed was a tender-hearted mukhtar to slit the wealthy’s pockets, letting change rain freely.

The traditional benchmark for American political success is 100 days, mainly because it’s a symmetrical number associated with our highest traded bill. How’s Mayor McGovernmentCheese doing after his first three months?

Three of the most nightmarish words a child can hear: No Happy Meal.

The Gotham GimmeMayor had a quarter-year to review the city’s books and reached one insurmountable conclusion. The richest, most powerful, most influential, most titanic city on earth was straitened. Impecunious. Purse poor. Light on coin. Thirty cents. Down at its Louboutin heels.

The cash-strapped Cham reportedly described the city’s ledgers as bleeding gules, and his own administration as “worse than broke.” Such hard-uppery didn’t stop the Mayor from creating the first Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs last month—just imagine the letterhead cost with a showy acronym like that!

The fisc pinch has curbed the Mamdani administration’s banner issues. Those fareless MTA jitneys? Delayed indefinitely. City-subsidized grocery stores? Hope you aren’t hungry until next year! As for putting your rent in amber, and nixxing any incentive for your super to fix the growing crack in your apartment’s central retention pillar, let’s hope you can keep breaking that monthly nut until the fall.

What about libraries, those idols of liberal activism? Mamdani pledged to come to the aid of struggling bibliotechas and not do as all money-desperate pols do and treat the stacks like a stash. Many apologies for Shel Silverstein and Margaret Wise Brown. The new Chief Equity Officer’s salary has to come from somewhere. Goodnight, Moolah!

The surly band of reds who canvased, marched, and knocked on countless doors for Mamdani must be piqued, right? The great, glorious Rodchenko-colored future that was offered looks more like drab hum-drum sameness. No roads paved in gold. No sidewalk joints filled with the brain matter of oppressors. No Wall Street executives run out on an Amtrak rail. And most despairing of all: NO FREE BODEGA BACON EGG AND CHEESES!

The perfidious Proconsul has to feel the noose tightening around his soft neck. Tumbrils have to be erected outside Gracie Mansion. Sans-culottes exercised more patience than the $12 latte laptop class that gave the Empire City its first socialist seigneur.

Oh, but wily Mamdani has a plan. (What collectivist doesn’t think ahead?) It’s the distributionist dodge practiced since the October Revolution: blame the before! In this case, it’s the Adams Administration that left the city in a lootish lurch. Back in January, after a cursory glance at accounts, Mamdani gently introduced his impending letdown: “There is a massive fiscal deficit in our City’s budget to the tune of at least $12 billion.” A blue city with a monetary impasse? Well, knock me over with a feather! Hard-left policies engendering financial fracas is as predictable as the sunrise.

No matter. Scapegoating is the socialist’s favorite scheme, next to making magic-bean guarantees. Financiers, billionaires, property-owners, tight-fisted aldermen, Florida refugees, honorarium Albanians, Boeing, AIPAC, mean, ol’ Mom and Dad—the roving targets of prog angst are endless.

Let’s not forget the ultimate socialist scourge: the iron law of mathematics. Mamdani originally planned to foot the bill for the Department of Green Grocers through a tax-cut program for corporate food merchants. Too bad the math didn’t pencil out. This FRESH fund only shaved off $30 million in revenue—not the “$140 million” pile then-candidate Mamdani attested was available. Ah, well. Who believes bourgeois arithmetic anyway? Rikers may soon have its own holding block for accountants.

Chin up, all you five-borough Bolsheviks! You need only wait a few more years until finally, at long last, you can walk into a government-stabilized grub spot to pick up some below-market-price quinoa. That is, unless an aggressive vagrant or illegal alien or truant child snatches it first. Nobody said socialism would be safe.