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.
Its the problem Democrats (and other left leaning parties) fundamentally have.
Right wing supporters more or less want nothing to change outside of the right people to suffer just a little bit more. So if their candidate hurts the wrong people? Whatever, they looked black enough, it’s still good.
Left wing? We actually want something. But what we want varies drastically. You want a focus on healthcare. I want UBI. Fred there… doesn’t give a shit about trans people but DOES want lower taxes. And so forth.
And that is the problem. If people vote for a candidate because they want X and don’t get X? It is a rapid trip to “my vote doesn’t matter” and “douche and a turd sandwich”. We saw a lot of that happen with Biden and Obama where people outright ignore the good they did in favor of the good they didn’t do.
So its a balancing act. Promise big so you can get votes but not so big that those voters get disillusioned. This very much seems like the latter to me but I also know that NYC is REAL weird economically so it might actually be feasible since the folk buying those minimum wage fueled services tend to have “real” jobs.
Yeah. I also feel like there is a push by some conservatives to leftists to have this view. Don’t participate in elections, just protest in a specific way that we can film to distort your arguments to our audience.
Yeah. It is why I very much side eye the people who feel the need to talk about how the most pointless and milquetoast of things are “better than nothing”.
The reality is that people only care so much for any given set of indignities. And most people are perfectly happy to equate “I marched with Dr King” and “I only watched a little bit of Twitch during the boycott”