That’s particularly true this time of year, when you’re fighting crowds or scouring online sites for whatever it is the child in your life really, really, really wants.
But everything about children costs big bucks. Healthcare. Diapers. Clothes. Toys. Sporting stuff. Music lessons. School supplies. Trips to the theme park.
And that might be why people are procreating less. Which has many people, not just white conservatives, very nervous. Because as the population gets older, it needs more on that end as well – and, like kids, being old is also expensive.
One of the reasons Zohran Mamdani manged to get elected mayor of New York is his proposal for universal child care. The idea comes from talking to people about what would make their lives more affordable, and this is a big idea.
Parents spend $10,000 or more a year paying someone to watch their kids while they work. They wrestle with the idea of one parent – it’s usually, but not always, the mom – staying home because of the cost.
Which ultimately results in other problems: a lower standard of living because of diminished income, and frustrated and unfulfilled people not able to use their talents to the extent they’d like.
So the idea of universal child care seems like a political winner. At least that’s what New York Gov. Kathy Hochul thinks.
Hochul seems to be clearing a path for Mamdani to fullill his campaign promise. In fact, she’s looking to make it moot – not only would there be universal health care in the city, but in the whole state of New York – from Niagara Falls to Montauk Point.
It would cost a fortune.
New Mexico recently enacted universal child care. According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, it’ll cost the Land of Enchantment $1 billion this fiscal year.
But the state has the money. It gets paid royalties for fossil fuels extracted from its land. This, despite the fact that New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the union. But it’s a boon for struggling families – and certainly a reason to keep your home where it is if you aspire to or have kids.
New York has no fossil fuels. What it does have is wealth. So many of the richest people in the nation live in the metropolitan area. Real estate prices are ridiculously high.
So Hochul is looking for a way to tap into that wealth for what would likely be a $7 billion expense to subsidize child care for every family who needs it.
The thing is doing so would partly pay for itself.
New York is one of the states that is losing population to the Sun Belt. It can’t change the weather, particularly in the Adirondacks, but it can make it more financially attractive to live and work here. And while businesses might grumble about additional taxes, they’ll be partly offset by finding it easier to get and keep workers.
We’ll see how Hochul does. She’s running for re-election next year and might have her eyes on a national profile. Universal child care – letting parents keep about $20 grand a year – would be a good way of letting everyone know that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with kids today.
When Zohran Mamdani claimed victory Tuesday in New York City’s mayoral race, he led the crowd in a chant of three of his relentless campaign taglines.
One was for freezing the monthly rate in rent-stabilized apartments.
The second was for providing free universal childcare.
Both of those promises addressed his overall theme of making one of the nation’s most expensive cities more affordable for people who work there.
The third might surprise people who don’t live in or near a big city.
Making buses fast and free.
When people worry about making ends meet, of course they think of where they’re going to live. Then come eating and healthcare, two things that are much more in the jurisdiction of federal and state governments. And childcare is a worrisome essential for any family with or thinking about raising children.
But transportation is often an afterthought. If I have a job, or a doctor’s appointment, or a family get-together, I’ll figure out a way to get there.
The problem is that it’s no so easy.
The assumption in America is that everybody has a car. In suburbia, every household averages two cars – if there are teens or young adults living at home, it could be as many as four or five vehicles clogging the driveway and the garage.
But in cities, cars are a nuisance. Their main purpose is for getting large amounts of groceries or taking a weekend trip out of town.
So the idea of improving bus service in New York City – and even creating lines that don’t charge the $2.90 (make that $3 on the day Mamdani takes office) one-way fare – resonates with city residents.
It goes to a larger issue that doesn’t just apply to New York.
For too long, we’ve relied on automobiles as our main source of transport. We’ve been sold on the idea that they are about our freedom to travel in the style we want – in a capsule that’s heated or cooled to our specs, with our music or our talking heads, eating whatever we want.
But is it freedom?
When I think about what time in my life I would love to get back now that it’s becoming a more precious commodity, it is not the hours I’ve spent playing video games or watching the Mets lose.
It’s the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent sitting in traffic. Moving 10 feet at a time. Swearing at people cutting into my lane. Not knowing why this is happening – is it construction, is it an accident. One time, I swear, it was people watching a very attractive woman riding a horse on a bridle path adjacent to the road.
So the idea of making buses fast and free has quite the appeal. If you can get from your house to where your need to go quickly – without worrying about congestion, gas, mechanical issues and finding a parking space – you might sign up for that.
In the process, you’d be saving yourself some money and – as a nice fringe benefit – help combat climate change.
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One issue I harp on is that there is often a lack of imagination in considering new public transportation. As I’ve said before, innovation in transportation has come at nowhere near the speed of innovation in telecommunications.
It doesn’t even have to be some new form of transport – like a maglev train or a vacuum tube.
In Los Angeles, there’s a proposal to put up a gondola service from downtown to Dodger Stadium more than a mile away. It seems like the kind of imaginative idea that would help L.A., especially given it’s troubled relationship with auto.
The problem is that there are environmental concerns, particularly among residents of the city’s Chinatown. I’m not sure how a gondola would be worse than the exhaust from hundreds of cars on Alameda Street, but that’s something better suited for the folks in the community to sort out.
The important thing is that people are starting to think about this problem – particularly areas that have been bypassed in previous projects.
In New York, there’s a proposal to use abandoned freight tracks to connect neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn via light rail. It seems like the line won’t take forever to build and could give people a way to get places without going through the mishegas that is Manhattan Island.
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle are extending rail services further into their outskirts and suburbs. Austin, Atlanta and Madison, Wisconsin, are working on major bus rapid transit projects.
A lot of these projects derive their funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that President Joe Biden – you know, the guy your TV talking head thinks didn’t do anything worthwhile – signed into law in 2021. That act also is responsible for the traffic congestion around construction zones around the country – which isn’t fun but still somewhat better than a chunk of interstate highway collapsing in the middle of the night.
New ideas should be encouraged – and it’s great that some of the new projects will be here before 2028. But old ways of getting from here to there can and should be modernized, made more efficient, expanded and cost a lot less.
Zohran Mamdani understands that, when it comes to creating an affordability agenda for one of the most improbable political runs in American history, boiling it down to “fast and free buses” works nicely.
It’s not so much that New Yorkers should hold him – and the rest of us hold our elected officials – to it. It’s that we need to put the car in the garage and help them get these plans in motion.
I was jealous of my New York City friends and family who are able to vote for Zohran Mamdani for mayor.
I’ll get back to that point in a bit. But first, let’s discuss Election Day 2025.
It doesn’t garner near the attention that Election Day 2024 did or even Election Day 2026 will. That’s understandable to an extent. The people on the ballot in a presidential, gubernatorial or congressional race get lots of attention on TV or online.
But this year’s elections – if there is, in fact, an election where you live – are generally local. You might know the town supervisor as the guy who lives a couple of blocks away or the woman whose kid goes to the same school as yours. But they’re not generally prominent figures – people who show up on a screen in your home.
Until they are. Local governments are like farm teams in baseball. Most of the people involved never make it to the big leagues – but generally you become a national or state political figure after winning some smaller race in a community.
For example, I just saw a social media post from U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Cory Booker. His first election was to a municipal council in Newark, New Jersey, in 1997. Mitch McConnell, the venerable Kentucky senator and former party leader, first won a county executive race in 1977.
And even if these people up for election next week don’t become national names, they potentially affect your life in many ways.
Councils appropriate money and help determine who gets taxed and by how much. Judges preside over criminal and civil cases or even that speeding ticket you want to fight. Town clerks collect your property tax money and send you the receipts that you need for your IRS filing. The highway superintendent makes assignments for clearing your street after a storm.
So the people who say something like “Well, nobody’s up this year, why do I need to vote?” don’t really understand how our system works. That what happens at the local level is just as important as what happens nationally.
The most prominent races this year are for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. Incumbents are term-limited in both states – a Democrat in New Jersey, a Republican in Virginia.
The Democratic candidates in both states – Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger – are ahead in pre-election polls, but are hardly shoo-ins. And even if they were, it’s important to send a message to Trump and his ilk that their conduct is unacceptable.
We should be trying to beat him bigly.
There are also mayoral races in many of the nation’s big cities. Including, of course, New York – the race which has dominated political coverage for months.
The leading candidate, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, may be running the best campaign I have seen in my lifetime – and I’ve been a political junkie since I was 5 years old. It is not, as fear-mongering detractors argue, that he is converting gullible millennials into socialist zombies.
What Mamdani does so well is listen. He spent the first part of his campaign figuring out what New Yorkers want – to afford living within in the five boroughs. His proposals, which are more detailed than any I’ve seen in a campaign, get at how he will address costs. Nobody is complaining that he is not specific.
Friends outside New York ask if Mamdani translates to their part of the nation. The answer is not that Georgia or Illinois or Virginia need necessarily embrace his democratic socialism. The answer is that Democrats need to hear what their potential constituents are saying about their problems, then propose solutions that people believe could work.
It’s a trial-and-error process, not a Mount Olympus process. Making people feel as though they’re invested in their community’s success is how Democrats will re-emerge as the dominant political party – and, in the process, save the United States from the Republican-spearheaded drive toward totalitarianism.
Where I live, northwest of the city in Rockland County, politics are a little bleaker – and very weird.
Rank-and-file Democrats can’t stand the county executive, a former New York City cop named Ed Day. He always seems to run on fear of the city, that we in Rockland don’t ‘share the values” of the Gotham menace.
Which is shorthand for “we don’t have a lot of people of color up here” and we don’t want any more.
For example, Day’s campaign literature – a waste of money, as you’ll see in a bit – talks about how he managed to fight New York City’s effort to ship 400 undocumented immigrants to hotels in the county.
What Day doesn’t say is that those immigrants were shipped to Manhattan by Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas, used as political pawns to make some stupid point. If those clucks wanted to maybe help alleviate a problem of getting overwhelmed by migrants, maybe they would have worked with neighboring areas to relocate the, you know, human beings.
But expecting DeSantis or Abbott to act in a way consistent with the Christian teachings they boast of heeding is folly. And you can count Ed Day with them.
The biggest problem with Rockland, as I alluded to last week in my post on the No King’s Day event in Nanuet, is that there are few young people here. Young professionals do not want to live in a place where people are looking to ban books in schools and where the only jobs being created are low-wage ones in warehouses.
But the Republicans in Rockland, who attained dominance only within the last decade or so, have figured out how to maintain power. They’ve basically co-opted the Democratic party organization – so much so that there is no Democrat running against Day. (Which makes you wonder why he wasted any money on campaign literature). There is an independent who qualified for the ballot.
I voted for him when I cast my early vote this week. I voted for whatever Democrats were on the ballot for town and county offices – unless they were cross-endorsed by Republicans.
There were three other races in which no Democrat was on the ballot. For highway commissioner, I wrote in my son, who at least has some experience working for the town. For a judgeship, I wrote in a friend who lives in the county (and usually reads this blog).
When it came to a town judgeship, I was hard pressed to come up with anyone else to write in.
And that’s when I remembered how jealous I was that New York City folk have Mamdani to rally around.
So I wrote him in.
There are those of you who think that I wasted my vote. You’re entitled to that opinion – let’s face it, he’s not going to beat the Republican woman running unopposed.
But, first, she ain’t going to be elected unanimously. I took care of that.
And, second, I wanted to send a message that I want to see candidates like Mamdani in Rockland who are more receptive to the real needs of the community and less interested in scaring us with New York City bogeymen.
So, back to the first sentence of this: I was jealous. I’m not any more.
Make yourself feel better and do good by your community. Vote in this election and make your voice heard. Even if you write-in Zohran Mamdani.
Last week, I contended that my generation of baby boomers is a disappointing lot.
This week, a generation of younger New Yorkers agreed.
That’s what I make of Zohran Mamdani’s surprising win in the Democratic primary of mayor of New York. Actually, Mamdani hasn’t won yet, but he’s well first in the first tabulation of ballots in the city’s ranked-choice voting, and runner-up Andrew Cuomo already conceded.
If he wins the general election in November – he’ll be favored but is not a lock – the 33-year-old Mamdani would be one of the youngest mayors in the city’s 400-year history. Jeez, he’s younger than my daughter.
And that – more than any other reason – might be why Mamdani shocked the city’s political establishment.
At age 71, there’s nothing I can drink or eat that gives me the boost of energy from walking the streets of New York. Like so many other great cities, it’s where young people flock to eat, to listen, to play, to watch, to have fun. It moves fast. Its active residents want nothing more than to be able to move at their own pace without encumbrance.
Most of all, it’s a city tired of being encumbered by a generation that believes tall buildings and luxury define greatness.
New York is about waiting in line 40 minutes for a $5 roast pork takeout dinner in Chinatown. New York is about sitting by the Central Park Reservoir while a four-person jazz combo performs a stunning rendition of “Embraceable You.” New York is about art around you, strange outfits, unisex bathrooms and the quest for the perfect pizza slice.
Mamdani seems to understand that.
The people in the Democratic establishment don’t. They think they’re living in a city that requires the approval of the monied class to fund development. They fall back on people with well-known names and older celebrities as if they – and not the young people in pubs and bodegas – are the city’s future.
I don’t live in New York City – I live north and west, in a place that’s trying its damnedest to be nothing like New York City. But because the people who live in the ‘burbs often depend on the city, they resent it.
That’s all crystallized in the congestion pricing debate. Nobody around here wants to pay $15 to drive south of 60th Street in Manhattan, and they see a toll for doing that as a violation of their privilege to use their car wherever the hell they want.
People who live in the congestion pricing zone love it. There’s less traffic, making the streets safer to cross. There’s less noise and pollution. Less horn honking. Buses run faster. Ambulances have fewer obstacles.
Mamdani seems to stand for ideas like that. He wants to find a way to make bus service free and faster.
He supports the idea of collective city-run supermarkets – not, as residents of Park Slope in Brooklyn know, a completely novel idea. This way, those who are less affluent don’t have to pay the gouged prices you can find at a Morton Williams or Gristedes – supermarket chains you and your wallet should be grateful aren’t in your area.
Mamdani’s win has shaken up New York politics and has the TV talking heads chattering. It has Republicans laser focused on demonizing him in order to get one of its longshots to squeak through. And it has the national Democrats in a quandary – do we embrace or ignore this guy?
So here are four thoughts:
— TRUMP: If you don’t think Mamdani’s win has something to do with Trump, you aren’t paying attention.
This is absolutely New York Democrats wanting not to feel powerless in the fight against a dictatorship. This is absolutely an entire segment of the populace saying that we’re giving up on trying to triangulate against Trump, let’s take the stupid bastard on.
Trump knows it. He went after Mamdani in one of those whatever-he-calls-a-Truth-Social posts.
Good. Let’s take the freakin’ gloves off.
— THE MIDDLE EAST: When I was young, there was a beer commercial highlighting New York’s diversity. Each had a tagline – for instance, for Italians, it would be “In New York City, where there are more than Italians than in the whole of Naples, more people drink Rheingold…”
For Jewish New Yorkers, it was “In New York City, where there are more Jews than in the whole of Israel, more people drink Rheingold…”
That was true back then. It’s not now, but New York City is as great as it is in part because of Jewish influence. New Yorkers schlep, they buy tchotchkes, they eat knishes – and all 8 million of them know what those phrases mean.
So Israel is a big issue here, much more so than in any other locality in the U.S. and maybe the world.
Mamdani is Muslim. That’s the background to the fact that he doesn’t support what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza. He didn’t dance around it. He made one unfortunate comment that gave opponents ammunition to say he’s antisemitic.
He’s not. Opposing Netanyahu and what’s happened in Gaza is not anti-Israel. As I said last week – and stand by – no one has done as much to reignite antisemitism in the world as Benjamin Netanyahu.
I suspect Mamdani will be more assertive about supporting Israeli’s right to exist as much as he supports the Palestinians’ right to self-determination – he kind of mumbled that in his appearance of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” this week.
Importantly, Mamdani garnered a lot of support from Jewish voters who are as heartsick about Gaza as they are about what Hamas did to kids and the elderly in October 2023. And his collaboration with one of his opponents who is Jewish, city comptroller Brad Lander, is meant to show that Mamdani will work with others to make the city a more affordable place to live.
THE DEVIL (aka SOCIALISM): Americans are conditioned to believe socialism is evil. It’s something the wealthiest among us have pushed since the Gilded Age.
In particular, because they take on the mantle of being “socialist,” communist states such as the Soviet Union and China are what are sold as being the outcome of turning toward socialism.
That’s not right. At all. We already have some vestiges of socialism. Defense contractors and farmers receive subsidies from the federal government. Most public transportation is run by local government agencies.
That’s not going to stop Mamdani’s opponents from conjuring images of empty store shelves and fleeing businesses if he’s elected.
But the real socialism Mamdani proposes is best seen in his plans for small businesses. He wants the city to foster small businesses – provide subsidies, cut fees and fines, offer mentoring programs to get new enterprises going.
That is what people want.
New Yorkers may have swallowed hard and realized they’re socialists after all. Now those who can’t stand that idea – think hedge fund managers and other moguls – need to decide if they want to do without being in the city.
If so, here’s my thought: Don’t let the limo door hit you on the way out.
DEMOCRATS: We’re now five-plus months into the dark world of Trumpdom II. Sternly worded letters, lawsuits, those endless fund-raising e-mails haven’t done much to make the Democratic party more palatable to the people who rejected it last November. For all of Trump’s plunge in polling, there’s been no political coalescing force.
Maybe Mamdani is the answer. But not in the way Democrats like to think.
The lazy thing would be to think the country is ready for a turn left as exemplified by Mamdani. And it does seem as though New York City might be ready for that after years of being run by supposedly business friendly types: Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg and Eric Adams.
But what Mamdani did was tap into what New Yorkers want for their city. His little ads were entertaining – watch the one about Halalinflation for a sense of what really matters.
Instead of preaching from a hill, Mamdani and his supporters traveled the city and understood the problems. And that’s what Democrats around the country need to do.
They do not need to mimic Mamdani’s policy ideas. They need to listen first and then adopt a plan of action that fits the community.
It might very well be more conservative. People in western Pennsylvania or Scottsdale or northern Minnesota might have their own unique issues that require action.
Listen and respond. Get a plan together. Adapt to your constituency. Be smart and engaged about it. No knee-jerk, one-size-fits-all solutions. I love New York, but I don’t think central Wisconsin should be a rural version of it.
In the midst of 100-degree heat and the casual “let’s lob a few bombs into Iran” during the past week, Mamdani’s primary win seems like a moment to cheer. It will certainly make for a little brightness among the gloom – especially if he can further build his coalition from now until November.
SUBJECTISM 