This campaign was very good at reciting taglines and aphorisms that resonate with certain parts of the voter base. This is one of them. The reporter asking the question basically teed up a softball and let him hit it, again without delivering anything policy related.
And yet, he’s the only candidate who seemed to have any willingness to address concerns of constituents in any significant way. The entire rest of the field was busy kissing Israel’s ring as if anyone in New York struggling to pay rent cares about that.
Just because a politician uses simple and catchy language doesn’t mean there isn’t policy substance behind it. Democrats have been losing for years trying to explain complicated macroeconomics to their voting base, Mamdani is one of the young democratic candidates who is a breath of fresh air.
All right, and where is the substance? Yes, there could be some. But where is it? Anybody seen it?
Democrats have also been losing on social justice issues while ignoring the actual economic concerns of the poor. Well, is "there shouldn't be billionaires" a social justice slogan, or is it going to actually help the poor in some way? I think it's more a social justice slogan.
The #1 issue is the economy, by far, between voters of both parties. Foreign policy is #4 on the list out of 10 (Pew Research).
I’ll also remind you that this is a mayoral race. The pew research numbers I’m citing are for president of the United States.
I am quite aware that Cuomo is a terrible candidate, that doesn’t take away from Mamdani being a very good candidate in terms of his effectiveness at conveying his message and building a coalition.
Of course none of us know yet whether he will be a good mayor.
Democrats explaining macroeconomics to their voting base?? Never have I seen such a thing. They generally do what Mamdani did: promise things that people want for free or for cheap.
With some hate for some groups added for balance.
You mean like cheap eggs and hate for undocumented immigrants and trans people?
You say Democrats just want to promise freebies so I’ll give you a fun challenge: find me the last Republican Congress that passed a budget that reduced the growth of the national deficit.
I’ll give you a hint there, it’s not the Tax Cut and Jobs Act nor the Big Beautiful Bill.
Meanwhile, Medicare for All was estimated by the congressional budget office (nonpartisan) to save money.
I never understood this argument. What does it even mean not having billionaires. These “billionaires” are share holders in their own company. They don’t have liquid cash worth billions.
It’s the value of the shares that make them billionaires.
Is the politician suggesting they should liquidate their shares? Who will own the company then? Will they keep changing ownership and diluting shares if it reaches billion dollars?
This argument doesn’t even make sense.
As far as taxes go, these are unrealised gains. Even for Capital gains to trigger, there has to be some kind of transfer/sale. And transfer/sale has a different meaning in tax and legal language.
The whole “rich people will pack up and leave” threat is abusive relationship nonsense.
Rich people have been threatening to leave higher tax desirable locations for ages and they never do it. Has Trump sold his tower in NYC because he has lower tax rates in Florida? No, of course not.
Why is billionaires row in Manhattan instead of Jacksonville Florida? After all, taxes are lower in Jacksonville.
Billionaires need New York more than New York needs billionaires.
David Tepper's short move to Miami in 2016 upset New Jersey's budget. Jeff Bezos permanently relocated to Miami a couple of years ago and while the move hasn't publicly affected the state of Washington in the same way, it's certainly constrained what Olympia can collect with its recently-instated excise tax on stocks holdings. In addition, the consequences aren't just short-term financial losses, but long-term political shifts. During the pandemic, California saw an exodus large enough to lose a seat in the House of Representatives where Texas saw a gain.
There is an abusive relationship, but it is one perpetrated by high-tax states against their constituents. Voting with one's feet and dollars is the solution to rid oneself of the abuse.
That’s really nice for Jeff Bezos and David Tepper. This point is moot because we statistically know that you’re worse off living in Miami as a bottom 90% income citizen compared to higher tax states.
Just look at statistics like education, median income, and healthcare.
Miami-dade is severely cost-burdened in cost of living compared to Seattle or New Jersey with worse rent to income.
Miami has a higher regional price parity.
New Jersey is ranked #1 in pre-k education.
Miami has a higher ratio in uninsured adults.
The Florida state health system is nearly bottom ranked at #44.
The bachelors degree attainment rate in Miami is horrific, half the rate of Seattle. I believe it’s the lowest attainment rate of any large city.
So I’m struggling to find a legitimacy to the argument that an average person would rather live with Jeff in Miami versus staying in New Jersey or Seattle.
The fact of the matter is that billionaires are fine living in a dysfunctional state because they have private infrastructure to shield them from reality.
A market matching supply and demand in many conditions creates the most prosperity for the transacting parties, creating economic activity which is accretive to the overall wealth of society.
However, as many economists may observe - prominently the 2024 Nobel prize laureate, Daron Acemoglu, markets are only accretive to prosperity where they enable economic participation (where capital is widely distributed) and choice among the highest number of people. This is a tenant of advanced democracies and arguably why they become wealthy nations.
Unregulated markets, where capital becomes narrowly distributed, form a more extractive economy where firms can seek rents on their market positions. This is inherently minimizes the prosperity formed by supply and demand. Examples are, suppressing output, limiting innovation and limiting wages/ working conditions. Innovation in an extractive economy becomes undesirable as it undermines the capital holder's ability to extract rent from their market position. In pragmatic terms, these capital holders are the billionare's discussed. There is no socially useful reason for a wealth to be derived from suppressing wages, share buybacks or regulatory capture etc - all forms of wealth creation in an extractive economy rather than a participatory one.
Ridiculous. There isn't a finite amount of wealth. That's why we call it "making" money. Bezos' wealth is fully invested in the economy, it creates jobs and stock value. It's not sitting in a vault.
"fully" is a stretch. His $230M island is contributing minimally to any economy. His $600M boats will add a few jobs, but it's a joke compared to what that wealth could create instead. His planes and helicopters contribute close to nothing. Those are assets that may as well be sitting in a vault and we're almost at $1B of them just in this list.
And that's while completely skipping the issue of whether his wealth growth actually helps anything or inhibits the growth of other companies at this point.
> There isn't a finite amount of wealth
That's a weird way to phrase it and ignores how complex the world economy is. If you wanna prove this wrong, feel free to provide me $1T from the infinite wealth source.
agreed. however the rate of wealth creation and concentration of capital are inverse to one another. Creative destruction does stem through market activity and the creation of Amazon did add to the collective wealth of America, as much of the digital economy lead to increased living standards.
However since the entrenchment of Amazon's market position, I would argue that the recent meaningful contribution to the overall wealth has been slight at best and creative destruction in their marketplace's has diminished. Amazon has increased shareholder value recently in ways that do not create, but transfer wealth. Share buybacks, layoffs etc. Creative destruction (i.e wealth creation) is iterative and requires open participation. I should be able to create a business along the value chain and experience competition from other businesses, equitable access to litigation, and benefit from my labor to freely make choices of my purchases and work place.
In in the most extractive economies, wealth is concentrated in capital to the point where no meaningful market activities occurs between capital and labor. The Confederate South for example - labor had zero value, no access to a legal system, and there was no resulting value chain development or internal consumer market. Nearly all wealth generated in such an economy came from the yield on capital, rather from wages. In today's modern economy an increasing share of the wealth comes from yield on capital relative to wages. Decreased competition of deployed capital results in an increase in unearned margin, thus higher yields.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
An illustration I always share: Imagine how rich someone earning $1 million a year would be. Certainly rare, and would lead a lifestyle unrecognizable to most. $200k a year puts you solidly in the upper middle class in most of America. To earn a billion dollars, you would need to earn $1 million for a thousand years. For a techno-oligarch, that would be closer to 100+ thousand years. Therefore that level of wealth must only come from the tremendous yield on capital significant shares of the corporations afford. While it's great that people should create such successful companies and retain shares, the intensifying inequality faced in America more closely resembles a more extractive, oligopolistic economy. In these economies, value creation is passed over in favor of preserving the pathways of existing wealth and power entrenchment.
There are a finite amount of resources. Wealth has value because it's a measure relative to others. Otherwise if everyone had the same amount of credits/dollars/units then why would anyone exchange their resources or labor for it?
So having wealth overly concentrated means some have a disproportionate amount of control over resources that impact everyone.
I didn’t read into his comments to see if he had this level of nuance but the idea that billionaires shouldn’t exist is perfectly valid under a model that supports capitalism as they indicate a market failure.
Everytime someone or some organization is able to accumulate vast amounts of wealth relative to others, it’s indicative of some barrier to entry into the field that ideally we would ruthlessly innovate away.
If he meant “billionaires shouldn’t” exist as in “punish people for success” then that’s just dumb imo
Cool, I didn’t suggest that and the downvoting by the community at even hinting that being an ultra rich oligarch is kinda what I was referencing in my other comment.
From a purely pro capitalistic view, you should treat the regular occurrence of billionaire creation(adjust this for inflation when a billion doesn’t sound big anymore) as a sign that you have market inefficiencies.
If you have a billion dollars from your business, why didn’t other players enter your market back when you were only making 10s of millions of dollars in profit?
You obviously have a profitable business, and other people like money too. Something in your market is preventing competition and if you want growth, which I have been told all around that we do want and this is why we adopted capitalism, then the market inefficiency should be identified and removed.
That may come in the form of taxation, but it may also come in the form of regulations that improve the market
Regardless of one's stance on Mamdani's politics this entire "how will NYC survive without the billionaires???" talk all over the news and social media has been exhausting. No, NYC isn't standing today because of the grace of a few dozen ultra rich individuals. They can all leave tomorrow, and the city will be perfectly fine. And we all know they won't, because no matter how much they shout otherwise on social media these people love the culture and convenience of liberal cities. The majority of Republican politicans, donors, CEOs and "influencers" wouldn't survive a day in the "middle America" they claim to embody.
Selling it would mean you pay taxes. Retaining it you pay taxes. It's probably not going to be seized if you don't abandon it, it's not like it's a low income neighborhood in the way of a highway.
This probably will be weaponised against him but as a proposition shorn of political intent, it has some good qualities. At root, he says the number of orders of magnitude in society should be more constrained. Having a span of 10^6 (billions to thousands, so knock of 3 of the 10^9 digits) is too many. I would think thats a defensible propositon.
Arguing that some people demand aspirational goals as high as that in order to do what they do begs many questions: Not that their demand is invalid (as demands go, I've never found bargaining very easy, arguing for billions is beyond my comprehension) but I seriously doubt the ability to add that much value is a skill distinct enough that it can command that rate of return, against all other choices.
Not "they can't generate the ROI" as much as "others can generate that ROI just as well, it's contestable".
Fund managers (for example) vary in costs, and returns, in ways which I think undermine the proposition here.
Many people take remarkably "fundamentalist" views of peoples rights to limitless potential. "it's my right to accumulate billions if I want" is very strong in opposition to this, aside from the people who may plausibly earn billions who have an entirely rational reason to disclaim alignment here. We experienced this 6 orders of magnitude down the tree in an australian election around tax concepts called "franking credits" which were proposed to be ended by the labor party. Large number of pensioners voted against it, despite being repeatedly told they had none, and would lose none: The meme of "Labor is coming for your franking credits" was unstoppable.
Many people who will fail to become millionaires, will oppose constraint on becoming Billionaires.
A parallel but unrelated case: Tax on lottery winnings. Fair or unfair?
The problem with these constructions is that they’re a Motte and Bailey: As soon as anyone starts pointing out the numerous problems with analyses that assume zero-sum games and no second-order consequences (like business owners restructuring to move their companies to nearly any other country which wont seize their ownership) the person retreats to something like “I just think taxes should be slightly higher” or “Why do you hate feeding the poor” or something.
If the US hadn't argued so vociferously against normalised worldwide minimum tax standards, this argument would be significantly weaker. The root cause of "well I'll just take my wealth elsewhere" is that taking it elsewhere attracts a benefit against leaving it in the economy with the new taxes.
It's certainly true that capital flight is a risk which has to be assessed, but at that point, we really can say (to re-enter the political domain) that the super rich are holding the rest of the economy to ransom.
Apple sitting on $1T of funds deciding how to spend it best in apple shareholder interests needs to be set against apple re-distributing $1T to shareholders, who then incur tax consequences with capital gain, and the rest of the world gets to move on with things that tax can do. Keeping the money inside Apples safe harbour isn't actually useful.
Remember, money is meant to be useful. Hoarding it, is not always helpful.
How does it apply here? There is no retreat - Mamdani's plan is public and is "taxes should be slightly higher" among other things. Specifically higher corporate tax and top percentage wealth tax for the area.
