Destructive schemes have been undertaken in the Democratic Republic of New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the huckster who invented the affordability scam, continues to take his voters for a ride. Stephen Yang for NY Post See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Americans’ continued exasperation with the cost of living crisis is no hoax, but Democrats’ affordability theater is little more than a dubious con job.
After watching Zohran Mamdani upset Andrew Cuomo in last year’s mayoral race, both radicals and relative moderates alike took the hint: Voters are desperate for candidates who speak to the frustration they feel at the gas pump, in the grocery line and after every utility payment.
It’s a lesson they’ve taken to heart on the campaign trail this election cycle.
Embattled Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer won’t shut up about his conference’s “affordability agenda,” and the progressive caucus in the House is pitching itself using the exact same phrase.
“Democrats in Key Senate Races Campaign on Addressing GOP Affordability Crisis, Bringing Down Costs, and Making Life Easier,” crowed the wordy headline of a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee press release issued on Friday.
It’s easy to forget in the two-to-three-news-cycles-a-day Trump era, but runaway inflation is precisely what cost Democrats the White House and both chambers of Congress 22 months ago.
Pent-up demand and supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic may have contributed to skyrocketing prices, but the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi spending spree made a bad situation much, much worse.
In the opening months of their reign, they swiped taxpayers’ credit card for $1.9 trillion.
Then, after months of denying the consequences of their actions, they finally admitted that something ought to be done about it.
So they swiped again, this time running up a tab of well over $700 billion for what they dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
That’s right, they dumped almost $3 trillion in cold hard cash into the economy under the supposition that would make everyone’s dollar go further.
Liberals’ unshakable confidence in their ability to spend themselves out of whatever economic hole they’ve fallen into represents just one of many major roadblocks standing in the way of their midterm message of choice.
Their obsession with engineering a utopian (or dystopian) society into existence by way of arbitrary, top-down edicts threatens to make life still more expensive for their weary constituents.
Take New York state’s foiled try at getting fossil fuel companies to pay reparations for their carbon emissions.
This cynical shakedown was recently struck down by an Obama-appointed federal judge on the grounds that it was flagrantly unconstitutional, but it ought to have been abandoned long ago on the grounds that it’s a terrible idea.
Gas and energy prices are too high; naturally, Democrats devised a new cost sure to be passed on to consumers, all in the name of “climate justice.”
Similarly destructive schemes have been undertaken in the Democratic Republic of New York City, where Mamdani, the huckster who invented the affordability scam, continues to take his voters for a ride.
On the campaign trail last year, the mayor presented his agenda as the antidote to high housing costs.
But the average monthly rent of an open Manhattan unit is climbing fast towards $7,000 — a 10% year-over-year increase.
So much for his hot, new, fresh idea of implementing price controls.
It turns out they only decrease supply and make life that much more expensive and difficult; who’d have thunk it?
The nepo-baby Bolshevik occupying Gracie Mansion struck again with his “Delivery Protection Act,” a harebrained attempt at forcing Amazon to directly hire delivery drivers instead of subcontracting out to local businesses.
The practical implications of its passage, though, would be higher costs passed on to consumers and the erasure of countless jobs.
And it’s hard to afford much of anything without an income.
Just ask the Californians put out of business by Gavin Newsom’s Assembly Bill 5, a gift to unions he dressed up as an effort to improve conditions for rideshare drivers that ended up wiping out the Golden State’s entire gig economy.
Oops — guess that’s why you don’t elect a philandering haircut perched atop an empty suit governor.
With the entire federal government in hand, Republicans bear the burden of making the case that they are better equipped to assuage cost-conscious voters’ concerns.
But they’d be well within their rights to remind Americans that Democrats’ only real interest in “affordability” is as a cynical slogan.
And that all of their actual ideas undermine it in practice.
