Drop Dead

 Mamdani to City: Elect Me (& Drop Dead)

Paving the Red-to-Green Road:

Why Mamdani’s Platform Leads to Collapse, Not Justice

DNC mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s platform is engineered to resonate with working-class frustrations, promising reduced costs for rent, transit, groceries, and childcare. For many New Yorkers living paycheck to paycheck, this is an enticing vision. But such expansive economic interventions are historically unsustainable. They rest on flawed assumptions, necessitate massive public expenditure, and consistently ignore the long-term consequences of government overreach.

As someone born in Queens and educated at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, I knew New York City well in the 1970s, a period of fiscal collapse and rampant crime. The city’s 1975 near-bankruptcy was no mere budgeting mishap. It was the cumulative result of runaway municipal spending, unaffordable union contracts, and unsustainable reliance on federal aid.¹

By 1975, New York faced

• Skyrocketing violent crime across boroughs

• Blackouts, looting, and social disorder

• A fiscal crisis so severe that President Gerald Ford initially declined to assist, prompting the infamous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”²

• A reluctant federal bailout granted only after intense political pressure³

This era should serve as a warning against the dangers of unchecked progressive governance. Recovery did not begin until the 1990s, under a very different ideological framework:

• "Broken Windows" policing and data-driven CompStat enforcement brought public safety back to the streets⁴

• Fiscal discipline was restored under Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani⁵

• Economic growth was driven by Wall Street, technology, and revitalized business corridors

• Public-private partnerships transformed areas like Times Square, Harlem, and SoHo

• Public Assistance reform introduced workfare and promoted personal responsibility⁶

New York’s renaissance was not accidental—it was ideological. The city shifted from welfare-state collapse to free-market recovery. Yet today, Assemblyman Mamdani proposes a return to top-down economic control; only now the old red path of socialism is painted green in the name of “climate justice,” and moralized with quasi-theocratic undertones.

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From Red to Green to Theocracy

Mamdani’s political program fuses classic socialist economic policies with growing theocratic language, often cloaked in moral absolutism. This red-to-green-to-theocracy trajectory has historical precedent:

• Iran (1979): Leftist revolutionaries helped depose the Shah, only to be replaced—and in many cases, executed—by Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic state⁷

• Sudan (1989): Leftist-leaning reforms gave way to Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist dictatorship, with dire consequences for civil liberties⁸

• Lebanon: Once a hub of Free Enterprise orientation, Lebanon has seen a political takeover by Hezbollah, merging socialist welfare with militant Shi’a governance⁹

• Venezuela: A socialist revolution devolved into economic collapse, rationing, blackouts, and political repression under Nicolás Maduro¹⁰

Mamdani’s alignment with both the Democratic Socialists of America and pro-Islamist political currents risks replicating these failed trajectories. His rhetoric bears unmistakable signs of ideological fusionism, radical economics, identity politics, and moral absolutism.

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Let’s Break Down His Platform

1. Rent Control and Housing

While politically appealing, rent control has long-term negative effects. It reduces the incentive for landlords to maintain or improve units, leads to housing shortages, and shifts costs onto unregulated segments of the market, like the conversion of apartments into condominiums and co-ops.¹¹ Over time, quality of life diminishes, and cities suffer from disinvestment.

2. Free Transit and Public Takeovers

The MTA already operates at a deficit. Making public transit free would require billions in additional revenue or debt financing. Public ownership of bus systems without competitive incentives breeds inefficiency, not innovation.¹²

3. Government Food Policy

State-run food programs consistently fail. In East Germany, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, food nationalization produced chronic shortages, food waste, and black markets. New York needs zoning reform and local grocery incentives, not price-fixing or rationing schemes.¹³

4. Universal Childcare

Universal childcare, while idealistic, often displaces successful nonprofit and religious providers. It introduces bureaucracy, erodes parental choice, and leads to higher taxes for services that will not meet diverse family needs.¹⁴

5. Who Pays?

Progressive proposals to fund these programs through wealth taxes and corporate levies overlook the mobility of capital. High-income earners and businesses are leaving New York in record numbers.¹⁵ Shrinking the tax base weakens the very public services progressives claim to champion.

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Conclusion

Mamdani’s platform is not innovative—it is ideological nostalgia. It romanticizes failed regimes and recycles economic fantasies long disproven by history. The red-to-green path he lays out is not a road to justice but a detour toward regression. Its destination is not equality or sustainability, but fiscal collapse, reduced liberties, and an increasingly authoritarian political culture cloaked in the language of virtue.

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Footnotes

1. Freeman, Joshua B. Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. The New Press, 2000. ↩

2. "Ford to City: Drop Dead." New York Daily News, October 30, 1975. ↩

3. Cannato, Vincent J. The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. Basic Books, 2001. ↩

4. Kelling, George L., and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The Atlantic, March 1982. ↩

5. Giuliani, Rudolph W. Leadership. Hyperion, 2002. ↩

6. Mead, Lawrence M. The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America. Basic Books, 1992. ↩

7. Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ↩

8. De Waal, Alex. The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power. Polity, 2015. ↩

9. Norton, Augustus Richard. Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton University Press, 2007. ↩

10. Corrales, Javier, and Michael Penfold. Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chávez. Brookings Institution Press, 2011. ↩

11. Glaeser, Edward L., and Erzo F.P. Luttmer. "The Misallocation of Housing Under Rent Control." American Economic Review, vol. 93, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1027–1046. ↩

12. MTA 2023 Financial Plan, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, mta.info. ↩

13. Coyne, Christopher J., and Abigail R. Hall. Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism. Stanford University Press, 2018. ↩

14. Whitehurst, Grover J. "Universal Pre-K Is Not the Answer." Brookings Institution, 2014. ↩

15. Hughes, C.J. “Why Are So Many Wealthy New Yorkers Fleeing the State?” The New York Times, February 8, 2023. 

16. Note: This document includes editorial assistance from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a language model designed to support research, writing, and analysis. All content, conclusions, and citations were generated or verified by Stanley Yavneh Klos. Responsibility for the views and accuracy of the information presented lies with the author.