New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani forcefully defended his call for a $30 minimum wage during the final debate of the race Wednesday night, warning that under the status quo, the expensive metropolis is at growing risk of becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”
The inability of many New Yorkers to make a livable wage in the city, Mamdani said, “is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut, because they can’t afford to live in New York City.”
Under Mamdani’s proposal, which would have to be approved by lawmakers, New York City’s wage floor would rise incrementally before reaching $30 an hour by 2030. The minimum wage would then be tied to either cost-of-living increases or worker productivity jumps.
Do people in power not realize that if workers make more money they’ll also spend more money, thereby helping businesses profit?
That would result in a redistribution of wealth. I think most billionaires would rather live in an Ivory Tower in the middle of the desert than live in a 10-bedroom mansion alongside lesser millionaires in a diverse and prosperous city. They really couldn’t give a shit about normal people which is why people like Bezos want to bring in robots to do the work.
Seems they began the process of willfully ignoring this fact in the 1970s, and it’s now gotten to the point where no, they don’t realize, because they’re so divorced from reality they can’t.
The late 1970s was when the top tier tax rate fell below punitive levels. Unlike in the 1950s and 1960s (91% top-tier tax rate), there was more benefit to accepting the tax than spending the excess revenue on deductible expenses.
The tax policy used to drive the rich to spend their money rather than hoard it.
But the rich lose control when wealth is redistributed
Without breaking monopolies weath redistribution will end up mostly going bad to the same bilionaires and mega companies
But then the poors will have more power.
A strong middle class is much harder to rule.