Zohran & The Magic Bus
Communist Mayor Promises Free Buses, Bus Fares Go Up January 1
Zohran Mamdani takes office as the mayor of America’s largest city, New York, on January 1, 2026. This is only weeks away. Among the many ludicrous promises Mamdani made to the good people of New York City was that he would make public transportation free. That includes buses, a ubiquitous and often practical way to get around New York.
Right now, bus fare in New York City is $2.90. That’s for one ride. There are some discounts available for senior citizens and disabled individuals and there are ways to buy passes to get multiple rides at a discounted price. But the ordinary New Yorker who jumps on a city bus today is going to have to shell out $2.90.
On January 1, 2026—the day that Mamdani assumes the Mayor’s office—fares will go up to $3.00.
That’s right, the guy who campaigned on free public transportation will be in power the day they increase the rates by 5%. Of course, this fare hike was in the works before Mamdani could do anything about it, but it seems like a bad omen.
Free Bus Fare
One of Mamdani’s cornerstone election promises was free and fast buses in New York City. It’s hard not to like the idea. The trouble is that fanciful ideas have a way of running headfirst into cruel reality. The reality for Mamdani is that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is already running in the red—to the tune of $600M a year. That’s a lot of red ink, so it’s not exactly going to be easy to make the buses run free.
Mamdani has offered some imaginative ideas as to where to get the money for his magical free buses. He thinks maybe the MTA could scare up some money, despite their deficit, but the MTA is a state agency and doesn’t work for Mamdani. Future-Mayor Mamdani is confused and thinks, that as mayor of the city, he is in control of a state-run organization. The MTA is what they call a “public benefit corporation” and operates public transportation in 12 New York countries. They don’t work for Mamdani, since he’s not the governor.
Not The Governor
Not being the governor is going to be a big headache for Mamdani’s free bus scheme and other cockeyed plans. He has proposed the usual solution—namely, let’s just raise taxes. He even knows which tax he wants to increase—the corporate tax. A hefty corporate tax increase could be diverted to the city’s buses.
Here was Mamdani’s plan:
Anyone in New York city who earns more than a million a year pays an additional 2% tax (that’s $20,000 for every million you earn)
The corporate taxes would go from 7.25% to 11.5%
All of this money goes to Mamdani to do with it as he wants (OK, I’m inferring this last part)
The problem is that state taxes are controlled by the Governor and other state authorities of New York. Last time I checked, the Governor of New York was Kathy Hochul who has gone on record saying that she has no plans to raise corporate taxes, mainly because she knows that if you tax rich people into oblivion, the rich people relocate. (A guy who earns $10M a year has no trouble relocating to Tennessee or Texas or Florida. A guy who earns $40,000 a year has no such ability. High taxes eventually result in a poor community.)
Besides, Hochul is pretty busy these days with 150 bills piling up on her desk in Albany awaiting her signature. None of them involve raising taxes to give money to Mamdani.
Mamdani is upset. He needs that money to fund his free buses and also offer the free childcare he promised. He is an obstinate fellow; he thinks this is still doable.
The state of Massachusetts recently imposed a 4% surtax on people who earned a million or more. The difference is that the voters of Massachusetts voted for this tax hike in 2022 and it’s a state-wide thing. In 2025, this 4% surtax brought in about $3B for the state of Massachusetts. I guess Mamdani, like many other progressive Democrats, considers voting and voters to be a needless speed bump on the path to communism.
Magical Thinking
The problem with Mamdani is not that he doesn’t have good ideas. Offering free public transportation is a good idea. So is free childcare, free school lunches, free rent, free healthcare, free wardrobe allowance, free Netflix, free beer, and free everything else. The problem with “free” stuff is that somebody has to pay for it. The challenge in politics is not just coming up with cool ideas, it’s figuring out how to implement them.
Zohran Mamdani reminds me of the beauty pageant contestants who say they would like to have world peace. Sure. Great idea. The problem with world peace is making the idea into a reality.
A core problem of the progressive movement is that they think just having a good idea suffices. Implementation is a pesky chore for the know-nothing working class. It’s like the people who promote sustainable cities who declare that all of the energy in their imaginary cities (which they plan out in minute detail) is clean and comes from a small power plant. Ask them how it works and they have no idea. Press them a little more and then get annoyed, dismissive, elitist. “That can be managed by the technicians.” Technician to them is pronounced with the same respect nobles used to say the word “serf.” Technical people made things happen, because they’re not smart. The smart people are the ones who pontificate and declare what is needed.
Remember when somebody in Biden’s cabinet proposed that all military vehicles be electric? That’s magical thinking. It’s a lunatic idea proposed by somebody who did not give more than 10 seconds’ thought to the concept.
In the rarefied albeit insane world of progressive politics, Mamdani is a visionary. He saw value in free public transportation.
It’s now up to the serfs of the world to make it happen.
Serfs of the World, Unite
Speaking as one of the lower depths of what Mamdani would consider the servile class, I can tell you that we are not able to do things that cannot be done.
Mamdani promised something with no clear pathway to achieving it. New Yorkers are not going to vote for more taxes, and Governor Kathy Hochul won’t raise taxes. Unless Mamdani reaches into his own pockets, there is no money for this idea.
And without money, you can’t make stuff free. Ironic.
It seems like an omen, doesn’t it? The instant Mamdani takes office, the bus fares increase. His promise of free buses has already evaporated into the oblivion of impossibility.
He won’t be able to keep his promises. He won’t be able to shower his voters with the freebies he assured them would rain down on them. Bait and switch.
It’s called deception, and it’s how communists work. If Castro had taken over Cuba promising them an authoritarian government, substandard healthcare, rampant poverty, loss of freedom of speech, and closed churches, no one would have allowed him to get near power. If Mao had promised to murder a million of his own citizens in the cultural revolution, some people might not have supported him. That’s one of the calling cards of communism: they always promise you good stuff that they don’t do so that they can get the power to do the bad stuff that’s in their hearts.
Mamdani, like Che Guevera, is photogenic and has a hipster look to him. Hey, even Stalin was handsome before he oversaw the deaths of 3 million of his own people, some by enforced starvation. Here’s Josef Stalin back when he was popular.
The Platform
The Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) is Mamdani’s party. In fact, Mamdani is a self-proclaimed “proud DSA member.” Let’s look at what they want to do. This is not stuff I imagined and imputed to them, it’s their official platform.
Eliminating “involuntary confinement” which translates into releasing all prisoners
Taking away weapons from law enforcement officers
Abolishing the U.S. Senate
Nationalizing all businesses
Despite his DSA pride, Mamdani has created a website with his official policies which are nowhere near as radical as his party’s politics. It reminds me of Barack Obama who was against gay marriage up until one day in 2008 when he suddenly was for it. I think Obama was always pro-gay-marriage but recognized it was politically expedient to oppose it until such time as the idea could be advanced. That’s part of the playbook.
You can find Zohran Mamdani’s official platform here. It’s full of other interesting but completely unrealistic ideas for New York City:
The city will run grocery stores
Rent will be frozen
Free childcare
Green schools, whatever that is
Increased minimum wage to $30/hour by 2030 (that’s $62,400 a year)
“Trump-proofing New York City”
Reinforcing the Sanctuary City status of New York
The funny thing is that not all of these are municipal issues. And when it comes to “Trump-proofing” the city, Mamdani claims that it is Trump who has made life in the Big Apple so unaffordable. So Mamdani will make the city more affordable by “Trump proofing” it. Yes, rents are high in New York City because Trump caused it.
Elites and Magical Thinking
Zohran Mamdani is not a man of the people; he’s an international man of mystery, a child of great privilege, the son of a wealthy filmmaker and Hollywood insider, and a guy who never held a real job. He never scrambled to pay the rent or struggles to keep up with minimums on credit cards. His family owns a lavish “compound” in Uganda, a nation with which the United States does not have an extradition treaty (just sayin’). He’s educated, articulate, and bright in the way that Ivy League people are bright—they are skilled at parroting the ideas force-fed to them by wealthy Marxist professors. They know all the news CNN feeds them. But they don’t know reality.
City-run grocery stores are a terrible idea. Free childcare sounds like a great job program for violent predatory adults who are going to attack kids. Free buses is a wonderful idea to allow for homeless people to live on public transportation. And buttressing the Sanctuary City policy of New York is an ideal way to drive lots of illegal immigrants to the city, taking lower-tier jobs and committing crimes. Mamdani wants to build more affordable housing in New York (housing projects), so making the Sanctuary City policies of New York more robust will assure him of having a long list of illegals eager to claim some rent-controlled digs in Manhattan.
But the really bizarre thing about Mamdani is that he doesn’t know how things work. He doesn’t understand that, as mayor, he can’t raise corporate taxes. He’s probably never been to a grocery store and has no idea why city-run markets won’t be efficient.
So why did people vote for him? Mamdani didn’t win among the working class, he won among the elites. (New York has a lot of them; many progressives say a guy like Mamdani could only ever win an election in a place like New York or Boston.) These elites don’t live in the real world. They live in the magical Mamdani world where buses are free and the city runs the grocery stores—but these are the elites who don’t ride buses or do their own grocery shopping.
To a nobleman, the problems of the peasants are imaginary things, things that can be cured by just wishing them away.