“Freezing the rent: Mamdani’s signature campaign promise was to freeze the rent for more than 2 million tenants living in rent-controlled housing. But the city’s cost of living has grown unabated despite decades of rent control—which, coupled with restrictive zoning, has made the city’s housing shortage worse.
$30 minimum wage: There’s good reason for New Yorkers to be skeptical of Mamdani’s plan to raise the minimum wage. When the city raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018, the predictable result was increased unemployment and black markets in labor. Nearly doubling the current minimum wage of $16.50 by 2030 would produce similar consequences.
“Free” buses: On the campaign trail, Mamdani promised to eliminate the fare on every city bus to make them “fast” and “free.” The plan would cost taxpayers $600 million–$800 million annually and likely result in slower speeds, which is what happened when the city piloted five fare-free bus lines in 2023 and 2024.
Government-run grocery stores: Mamdani has proposed not-for-profit, government-run grocery stores—subsidized to the tune of $140 million a year—to reduce prices at the checkout counter. New York’s grocery stores, like others across the country, operate on razor-thin margins. The profit motive isn’t to blame for high grocery prices; inflation and supply chain disruptions are.
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$5 billion corporate tax: Naturally, Mamdani promises that you won’t pay for his multi-billion dollar programs—greedy corporations will! If Mamdani manages to convince state lawmakers to increase the city’s corporate tax rate from 7.5 percent to 11.5 percent, New Yorkers should expect companies to reduce salaries, benefits, and headcount to remain in business. Some might opt to abandon the city altogether, leaving the taxpayers of the People’s Republic of New York to foot the bill for their socialist utopia.”
“”On April 1, 2024, California raised its minimum wage from $16 to $20 per hour for fast-food workers employed at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide,” Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, and Jonathan Meer write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that was first addressed by Reason’s Peter Suderman in the November print issue. “Our median estimate suggests that California lost about 18,000 jobs that could have been retained if AB 1228 had not been passed.””
“Mamdani said that he is going to pay for his grocery stores by “redirecting” $140 million worth of city funding that is already being spent subsidizing corporate grocers. As the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney was the first to notice, that number is based on a misreading of a city website. The city subsidizes some private grocery stores at a cost of about $3.3 million per year. As some Bronx residents told Fox News’ Kennedy in a new video published by Reason, the city should focus instead on helping the homeless, dealing with “rats the size of cats,” and cleaning “all of the needles on the street.”
Direct assistance is a more cost-effective and less destructive way to support low-income households than government-run supermarkets, and it’s something the federal government already does in abundance. Through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, 1.79 million New Yorkers—20 percent of the city’s population—receive help purchasing groceries each month.”
“In 2023, California passed a law requiring a $20 per hour minimum wage for all fast-food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide.
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New research suggests that the mandate has also resulted in fewer jobs for struggling entry-level workers.
The law went into effect in April 2024 and increased the hourly pay of an estimated half a million workers across the state. But without the law in place, thousands more workers would likely have been employed.”
“Not even shutting down the government can stop Republicans from forcing their way into corporate boardrooms these days.
The federal government is, at the moment, incapable of completing its most basic and routine task—passing a budget—and yet it is simultaneously expanding its portfolio to include a 10 percent ownership stake in an Alaskan mining company.”
“New York’s experiment with delivery driver wage mandates hasn’t gone well. Pay went up after the 2023 rule kicked in, but so did prices—and many drivers left the market altogether. The city saw an 8 percent drop in its delivery workforce, while food delivery costs rose 10 percent, including a 12 percent jump in restaurant prices and a staggering 58 percent spike in app fees. Tips, meanwhile, plunged 47 percent. Platforms even started capping drivers
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Seattle followed suit in 2024 with a $26-an-hour minimum wage for delivery drivers—and immediately watched the system collapse. Apps tacked on a new $5 delivery fee, and with taxes added, customers were soon paying bills with nearly 30 percent of the cost unrelated to the food itself. DoorDash saw 33,000 fewer orders in just the first two weeks, wiping out about $1 million in restaurant sales.
Counter to the law’s intention, many Seattle delivery drivers saw their earnings slashed by over half. “Demand was dead,” according to one such driver. A recent report from gig companies found that, following the ordinance taking effect, delivery orders dropped 25 percent, and driver pay fell 28 percent per hour logged on.”
“Set aside the fact that the so-called epidemic of autism does not result from a surge in actual cases but from a broadening of the diagnosis over the past 50 years—from what psychiatrists in the 1970s called a form of childhood schizophrenia, marked by early social withdrawal, impaired language, and rigid, repetitive behaviors, to today’s ASD. This new understanding includes highly capable, sometimes gifted individuals who simply interact with others in unusual or atypical ways. Additionally, because social, educational, and health care services are now more accessible to children with ASD, increased parental awareness and more screening by pediatricians, school psychologists, and educators have led to greater detection.
That nuance seems lost on Kennedy, who treats autism as if it were an infection or a tumor.
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What we know so far about the link between prenatal acetaminophen and autism—that it remains inconclusive—is based on independent clinical studies not influenced by a government agenda. Without government interference, these studies might find definitive proof that prenatal acetaminophen causes ASD, or they could lead to dead ends, encouraging scientists to explore other possibilities.”
“Natcast signed on 200 members — notably, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Samsung, Google and AMD — to pursue breakthroughs in the foundational technology that powers virtually every modern asset from AI to defense systems. The group spent its year-and-a-half existence trying to set up and eventually run a national hub where that R&D would happen, along with programs to ease the semiconductor industry’s severe talent crunch.
Lutnick’s clawback produced deep uncertainty while companies, researchers and lawmakers scrambled to understand where it leaves over a dozen awardees, plus the remaining billions. Nearly $2 billion was promised to infrastructure, research and workforce projects in states like Arizona, New York, California and Texas.
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The Commerce head has focused its dealmaking heavily on chipmakers. His new “investment accelerator” was handed supervision of tens of billions of dollars in CHIPS subsidies and ordered to negotiate “much better deals than those of the previous administration.” The undermining of Natcast followed an agreement to grant the U.S. a 10 percent stake in Intel, when Lutnick redid the terms of its CHIPS award.
Seven people, including from three Capitol Hill offices, raised concerns with the possibility that renegotiations for this $7.4 billion may involve similar government equity stakes. People also questioned whether requirements to share revenue from research patents could be under consideration. Lutnick spoke about subjecting universities to the idea the day after he voided the Natcast contract.
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When the agency started soliciting proposals for R&D funding last week, it told applicants, as a condition of an award, they “may be required to issue to the Department equity, warrants, licenses to intellectual property, royalties or revenue sharing, or other such instruments to ensure a return on investment.” The guidelines do not mention the national hub, yet cite the law that established it.
LC: If we need these companies to produce important technology, then we don’t need special deals to help them. We should help them because it is good for the country. The technology will produce a better economy and therefore more normal tax revenue. If we want these companies to pay us back directly, just make sure they are paying their normal taxes.
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“They decided to burn two years of delay to try to create their own thing,” said a former Trump official, who, like several others for this report, was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “While Natcast was not a Republican initiative and wasn’t how we wanted it go, I think it was better than burning down the whole system and starting over again.”
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“The companies are scared,” said a person familiar with the industry dynamics. “Companies want CHIPS funding, and they’re very afraid that if they speak out, they’ll lose it. No one wants to come into the crosshairs of the administration.”
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“There’s just a feeling of, for many of us, a year’s work going down the tubes, taxpayer dollars being flushed down the toilet,” said one person closely associated with Natcast.”
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An industry lobbyist said, “those who stand to lose the most in this process will be start-ups and research centers that were at the cutting edge of innovation.””
“Interviews with more than a dozen technology executives over the past week revealed that the Trump administration’s announcements of government stakes in companies such as Intel have had a chilling effect, with executives now filtering many decisions through the prism of how the White House might respond.”