Close inspection of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) race-based agenda found it to be a prime example of “moving the goalposts” for the benefit of government bureaucrats.
(Video Credit: Fox News Digital)
In his unabashed push toward Marxism, Gotham’s executive earned himself a probe from the Justice Department earlier this month when he unveiled his equity framework dubbed the “Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan.” While much of the criticism focused on his race-based agenda to prioritize resources for “black and brown New Yorkers,” an analyst with the Manhattan Institute concluded that Mamdani’s real objective is justifying greater government intervention.
“He’s essentially saying that when the federal government qualifies as somebody below the poverty line, which is essentially like $34,000, $35,000 a year — those might be like 2024 numbers, but it’s pretty close to that — we’re essentially moving the goalposts so anybody under $160,000 with children cannot afford to live in New York City,” Cities policy analyst Santiago Vidal Calvo told Fox News Digital.
Given that for most places in America, a six-figure salary like that would allow for a single-income family to live comfortably, Vidal Calvo insisted the plan was aimed at shifting the Overton Window to favor action from the government since you “don’t make a place more affordable by making people earn more.”
When he introduced his plan early in April, Hizzoner said, “And while today’s True Cost of Living Measure confirms that the affordability crisis touches every corner of our city, we know that these effects are not applied evenly. So often it is black and brown New Yorkers who are hit the hardest.”
Mamdani went on to call his plan a “first step in developing a whole-of-government approach to tackling that reality,” only to have Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon assert, “Sounds fish/illegal. Will review!”
Further analysis from Vidal Calvo detailed, “So the issue here is that we are focusing on a problem that the socialists in City Hall want to believe — that if you give people more money, they essentially can access more things. But you’re not asking what is the tradeoff of giving people more money. And just by placing the ‘True Cost of Living’ in New York City is $160,000 a year for people with children, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people, first can afford that life or, second, they are able to get those salaries.”
He argued that, instead of freezing rent or “stabilizing markets,” part of the solution was to create more housing in the city through deregulation.
Additionally, he criticized the line of thinking pervasive among leftists, telling Fox News Digital, “And we have now found that in academia, in many government programs, in many existing architectures of social structures, DEI does not work, and unfortunately, this might be just another case in which it fails, and not because of the well-intentioned reason of trying to make everybody earn a living, because I feel like that’s a good intention that everybody can have.”
“But it’s about solutions that they’re trying to actually approach,” said Vidal Calvo. “It’s about methodology of how they’re actually trying to approach this method. You cannot argue that just because somebody is a different race, it’s become insanely more unaffordable to make a living in New York City. That’s not how it works.”
Put another way, the analyst said, “I feel like this is just another way to put DEI on the table without calling DEI.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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