Mamdani Math

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 06, 2025

 

The Zohran Mamdani for Mayor campaign is promoting an online widget, the purpose of which is to capture the emails of naïve voters, but it does so by allowing them to calculate the implausible savings they will enjoy when everything is “free.”

 

The aptly named outlet Hell Gate gives an example of how the Mamdani campaign is trying to energize New York City residents about its “big three” commitments to voters:

 

For example, if you live in a $2,000 a month stabilized apartment, catch the bus eight times per week, and have one child under five who becomes newly eligible for universal childcare, the calculator deduces that under a Mamdani mayoralty, you’d be saving $26,712.86 annually by 2030. Most of the annual benefits in that scenario come from an estimated $22,000 per-child savings for parents who no longer have to pay for childcare.

 

Hell Gate observes that these three pledges will “require a significant expenditure of political capital” from Mamdani, to say nothing of the “state legislature’s willingness to increase taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers enough to pay for their $10 billion a year price tag.”

 

Even if the political stars align and Mamdani fulfills all his promises, however, they will still fail to meet the expectations his calculator app is setting.

 

“Free buses” aren’t free. They are exorbitantly expensive. There’s a reason why Kansas City, for example, reimposed fares on most riders after it zeroed out ridership fees in 2019. “The experiment resulted in a 30 percent increase in weekday riders and a 38 percent increase in weekend riders on the free buses,” Business Insider reported, “although many of these riders simply shifted from paid to unpaid routes.” The city’s $50 million experiment with free ridership cost more than anticipated — compelling the city to raise sales taxes and, eventually, to shutter the program and lean on “other communities” and the “private sector” to “contribute towards the funding” of the city’s mass transit programs. The cost of Mamdani’s $700 million free transportation plan is likely to be similarly cost-prohibitive.

 

The same could be said of the candidate’s proposal for “rent stabilization,” e.g., a price-fixing scheme for apartment rentals. It is axiomatic that efforts to distort the price mechanism in housing result in less construction and, therefore, more scarcity and increased costs. Forcing property owners to lease at uncompetitive rates eliminates incentives to build, to repair, and to properly administer their holdings. And since we’ve dispensed with market forces, the state must step in not just to set prices but to adjudicate disputes and monitor the condition of existing stock.

 

The costs of that program are not supported by property tax revenues, which tend to decline with the market value of a rent-controlled property. Whatever benefits are associated with cost controls in the rental market are outweighed by bureaucratic bloat and the “grey market” that develops around the transfer of rent-controlled properties between individuals with preexisting relationships that are more personal than commercial. “Poor families, single consumers, and young people entering the market are especially hard-hit by these costs,” the National Multifamily Housing Council observed.

 

Then there’s the promise of free childcare. It seems like the mayoral nominee’s supporters in the liberal press have done more to flesh out this proposal than the candidate has (sometimes, to their vocal consternation). But as City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas observed, if we deal only with the Mamdani plan as it is sparsely written, not as the Left would imagine it, it is a pie-eyed contrivance:

 

Why should infants and toddlers, who mainly need to be fed, held, and supervised at play, require care from staff trained and paid like public school teachers, whose average salary before health and retirement benefits, as of 2023, was about $100,000? Would the program start with three-year-olds and then expand gradually to younger children, or would it immediately include infants, despite the immense logistical challenges of entrusting babies, who cannot report abuse or neglect, to strangers?

 

As Gelinas and others concede, Mamdani may one day be able to claim half-victories in his pursuit of these and other progressive objectives if New York City and state are inclined to substantially raise taxes and divert revenue from other programs toward his utopian goals. But no one can yet account for the number of taxpayers who will simply decline to be extorted, taking their incomes with them and forcing the city to squeeze ever more blood from the Manhattan bedrock. Indeed, with major investment firms fleeing Wall Street for more inviting climates in places like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, the Mamdani effect is already visible.

 

The calculator gimmick is likely to raise New York City voters’ expectations, but the only thing its users can count on getting from it is Mamdani campaign fundraising emails.