Progressive Unity in New York

[justaprogressive]

New York’s mayoralty race is increasingly becoming a proxy for the national debate over what Democrats should stand for. Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who now stands a better than even chance of beating Andrew Cuomo, has come up with just the right one-line slogan for Democrats: The cost of living is killing working-class New Yorkers.

That’s true not just of New Yorkers. That phrase—“the cost of living”—includes unaffordable housing, sky-high child care costs, out-of-pocket expenses for health care, as well as college that requires disabling debt. And this didn’t just happen randomly. It reflects a disparity of economic and political power.

The tragic thing about the silly 2024 election-year debate about the price of eggs was that it really wasn’t about eggs. High-priced eggs became a proxy for the high cost of living generally. Poor Joe Biden didn’t have the wit to convert this small symbol into a debate about how the corporate economy is screwing working- and middle-class people generally.

Mamdani does, and more. What people care about is not “inflation”; that’s a statistical abstraction. They care about the backbreaking cost of the basics.

Government, in the right hands, has the capacity to change the high cost of living for the better, but the corporate domination of everything means that the change requires radical policies like controls on rents, an end to private equity ownership of housing, construction of substantial social housing, free or deeply subsidized public transit and child care, and debt-free college.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-06-16-progressive-unity-in-new-york/