For some unfathomable reason the citizens of New York City elected one Zohran Mamdani as their mayor. What's peculiar about him, and the very reason why they voted for him, is that he is very openly and blatantly socialist and communist, preaching the virtues of socialism and collectivism, denigrating capitalism, and making all kinds of asinine promises, like free bus rides for everybody, "taxing the rich", lower rent, and so on.
New Yorkers got bamboozled by him on many fronts, and some of the frauds were clear even before he got elected, as pointed out by many politicians and experts. Most prominently, he cannot raise taxes on the rich because he is a city mayor, and income tax is decided at the state level (by the New York State Senate in this case), not at the city level. He literally cannot raise those taxes. So that was just an outright lie from the get-go.
So what did he do instead? Well, he increased taxes that the city can legally raise, and that would be city property tax. In other words, now land owners within the city limits suddenly found themselves having to pay more taxes than before. Which in turn meant that, in addition to businesses, in the case of rental apartment complexes and condominiums, they had no choice but to pass that extra cost to the tenants. Which, indeed, meant that rents went up for everybody, including the poorest people in the city who couldn't afford it. Needless to say, his voters weren't happy.
One thing he also promised was to create a chain of grocery stores which would sell produce at affordable prices because, according to him, existing supermarkets are "price gouging".
That concept itself is absolutely asinine. Either he is a complete moron who doesn't know anything about economics, or he is once again lying through is teeth and defrauding his voters.
Grocery stores are, unsurprisingly, one of the most competitive forms of business that exists. Which, indeed, means that grocery stores are constantly having to try to "outcompete" the competition with lower prices. The margins in grocery stores are extremely tight, meaning that they are already selling their products for as cheap as they can afford, for the simple reason that if they tried to sell them for higher, people would just go to the competitor in the next building (if not even outright in the same building).
The idea that grocery stores are "price gouging" is patently absurd. They are already pinching every single penny they can, because of the heavy competition.
Mamdani is already waking up to the reality of things. His original plan of city-built and taxpayer-subsidized grocery stores has already reduced from several dozens to just five.
And another harsh reality that he has clearly been awakened to is that it's just not feasible to sell everything at a significantly reduced price. Thus, he has now changed his tune and, apparently, only a select category of produce will be sold at a reduced price, not everything.
And the thing is, and here's where the suspected fraud comes from, his budget for building those grocery stores are completely insane.
The first grocery store he is planning to build will cost 30 million USD. Which makes absolutely no sense.
Buying an existing grocery store and rebranding it, in the part of the city where he is planning to create his own, would cost according to experts about 1 to 3 million USD, depending on the size of the store and exact location. That would save 27 million and even more, which could be passed to the citizens.
And the thing is, according to experts, even building a completely new grocery store building from scratch (which is exactly what he's planning to do) would cost about 10 million USD. Which means that he is outright planning to spend about 3 times more on building one single store than it should cost.
Oh, and the timeline? According to these same experts it takes between 6 months and a year to build such a grocery store completely from scratch, depending on the site, size and complexity. Mamdani's plan? Five years to build it.
What many critics are surmising is that all of this is just a huge fraud: Even though he could just buy a grocery store at one tenth of the price, he is planning to build one from scratch at three times the cost of what it would normally do. Where is the extra 20 million USD going to? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but sound fishy.
And the five years to build something that ought to take less than a year? This may well be a ploy to try to make the citizens ie. voters feel dependent on him, so that they will keep him on office. After all, if the cheap socialist stores are just around the corner, just about ready to be finished and opened, just a few months more... well, what do you know, the citizens will feel compelled to keep voting for the same guy in order to have the grocery stores be finished.
The absurd timeline just feels strongly like a ploy to keep him in power. There's literally no reason why something that could be done in less than a year has to be done in five years instead. (And, in fact, if he were to just buy an existing grocery store, it could be done in a month, and at one tenth of the cost.)
Also consider what will happen if he were to actually succeed in creating these "socialist" grocery stores that sell produce for cheaper: It will drive the private companies out of business. Which is, rather obviously, what he wants.
And what do you think will happen if his grocery stores become a monopoly in the city?
(Of course in reality there's no danger of this because what he is planning is not economically feasible, and it will just collapse under its own impossibility.)
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