Yes, but don't stop there, any business operating in NYC needs to have proof of living wages for all its employees. If an NYC business pays their workers less than $20 / hour we all need to picket that business and publicly shame them into paying their workers a living NYC wage. All fast food business and mom and pops, pizzerias and other types of shops, we must organize 90k DSA + DNC volunteers and picket them into submission or until they go out of business.

If businesses refuse to increase their employees living wages to $20 an hour, Mamdani must then open competing city-run stores with much lower (subsidized) prices at the expense of tax payers to compete with private-run business until they go bust.

Store after store, not just Starbucks, but any business - inquire how much they pay their workers and decide if to boycott them!

The city can run it for far cheaper and while paying a living wage to its city employees.

Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami. The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue. The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing.

The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price. Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over. Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.

Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores. I saw someone who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in California put it perfectly, he said his landlord could no longer afford maintenance so the pool was filled with dirt, the floors had soft spots, and the foundation ended up cracking. That’s what overregulation does, it destroys quality.

People who voted for this will eventually feel the pain but they won’t blame the policies or the politicians, they’ll blame the rich for leaving.

In the face of all the devastation in gaza, people forget there are Israeli hostages being held from October 2023 till this day. Hostages that netanyahu is more than happy to forget about and bury under the gaza rubble.