New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is “moving the goalposts” on poverty in the nation’s largest city with his newly unveiled racial equity plan to justify a massive expansion of government intervention, a top city policy analyst warns.
Mamdani released his “Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan” in early August, which was promptly criticized by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department and Santiago Vidal Calvo of the Manhattan Institute, who told Fox News that the report’s claim that 62% of New Yorkers can’t make it in the city on a “true cost of living” is all a ploy to call a crisis that must be solved with more government.
“What he’s essentially doing is moving the goalposts,” Vidal Calvo explained. “He’s essentially saying that what 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.”
“Those numbers, in reality, if you live in New York City, they don’t sound crazy, they don’t sound, you know, high. But in all of reality, for any single person across America, $160,000 is, you know, a breadwinner. It’s essentially enough money to raise a family and to have children and to have a good life. So when we move the goalposts into that direction, without actually recognizing what are the underlying issues of the disease, what are the actual problems that make New York City expensive, then we’re just attributing a problem and throwing a dart at the board and saying, ‘This is it.’”
The “reality” of the situation, Vidal Calvo says, is that you “don’t make a place more affordable by making people earn more,” but instead the city needs to “ask the right questions” about policies that drive wage growth and new housing development.
“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,” Vidal Calvo said. “But you’re not asking what is the tradeoff of giving people more money. And just by placing that 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.”
The high cost of living in New York City is driven by several factors, including housing, which is an area where Vidal Calvo says City Hall needs to “encourage more housing being built around the city.”
“That’s how you lower the price of housing,” he said. “It’s not by freezing rent, it’s not by stabilizing markets—normally what that leads to is more and higher prices.”
Mamdani is also in hot water after backstabbing NYC residents with more price hikes.
New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Monday that New York State will provide an additional $1.5 billion to New York City over the next two fiscal years.
The funding includes $1 billion allocated for the current fiscal year and $500 million scheduled for the next fiscal year, according to the governor’s office.
The additional aid comes as Zohran Mamdani prepares to present his first city budget amid a projected financial shortfall. Mamdani has publicly advocated for increasing taxes on high-income earners as part of his broader fiscal agenda.
City officials have said the administration faces significant budget pressures, including commitments to expanded public services and social programs. State officials described the funding as a measure intended to stabilize city finances while longer-term budget negotiations continue.
The mayor’s office has indicated that discussions with Albany regarding revenue options remain ongoing.
Mamdani last month warned of a projected $12 billion budget gap that he attributed to what his administration described as underbudgeting by the prior administration under Eric Adams.
However, city officials later revised that estimate, acknowledging that the shortfall was at least $5 billion smaller than initially reported. The adjustment came after the administration determined that $7.2 billion in end-of-year tax revenue — largely driven by Wall Street bonuses — had not been fully accounted for in earlier projections, The Post noted.
Despite the revised deficit figures, Zohran Mamdani has continued to advocate for higher taxes on high-income earners, urging Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers to increase the city’s top income tax rate by 2% for residents earning more than $1 million annually.