Fare free buses?! This monster needs to be stopped.

Access to food, transportation, housing, it’s almost like he thinks the job of government is providing decent infrastructure.

Or "insur[ing] domestic Tranquility,...promot[ing] the general welfare." The Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves.
- General Welfare, sir! o7

People act like $30/hr is high. Note this would be the mayor of NYC, so it would be raised for NYC only if he got his way. The cheapest place you can get to live on your own there I am finding is 2600 a month. So say you made 30/hr. That's $62,400 working 40 hours a week. Take out Federal/state/city taxes ends up being around $46,112 take home. The place costed $31,200. Making the lowest rent findable in Manhattan 2/3 of $30/hr.

They wouldn't be able to get approved to even live there if they tried. They would have to rent a room from someone else with a 4 bedroom place renting to 4 people for around $1200/ month. And share bathrooms/kitchen/living space with people. And they would still struggle to get by if they paid for health insurance, travel costs to and from work, food, and the whole living crap.

$30 isn't radical for NYC, it's like base needed salary... And hope you have a good stable relationship with someone else making the same, then maybe you can get your own place together, just don't do something stupid like get pregnant because you can't afford to not go to work, and can't afford to put them in daycare so you would both have to uproot and move real quick finding jobs elsewhere.

Wait, we are gonna vote for a guy who is going to make renting a room more affordable?! COMMUNISM!! I WONT STAND FOR SUCH LUXURY LIVING CONDITIONS! /s
It says $30 by 2030. What is the term for Mayor? Is he promising something that literally cannot be done by him?
- Minimum wage is current around $16 there. Standardly you put a plan in place with a set date and partial increases up to that day to allow companies time to plan and get ready. For instance the last time federal minimum wage increased, it rolled out as such
  "The 2007 amendments increased the minimum wage to $5.85 per hour effective July 24, 2007; $6.55 per hour effective July 24, 2008; and $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009. "
  7.25 was what they said they were going to go to, but rolled it out slowly to prepare everyone.
  16-30 in a 4 year roll out makes sense

Jesus would NEVER Approve of ANY of these! AFFORDABLE housing? Jesus would BURN it to The Ground! PROTECTING your Neighbor? LAUGHABLE! This is the MOST Anti Jesus Platform EVER! Where's the ELIMINATING Healthcare? Where's the ELIMINATING Homes? Where's the HURTING your Neighbors? Where's the JESUS!

Here's how I think they see this:

Landlords will go out of business. For-profit grocery stores will go out of business. People I don't know won't suffer (there's even more letters at the end and I don't know what they mean; that scares me). Businesses will have to pay more to operate, therefore prices will rise for me to protect profits. Brown people will still be where I have to see and interact with them.

Conservatives are fearful. They think when someone gets something good, it's by taking from them. Fuck 'em.

Brown people will still be where I have to see and interact with them.
They don't even try to hide their racism anymore.

Americans will just go "this guy wants to instate free healthcare, cleanse police corruption, and to stop bombing the middle east!" and expect you to reel back in disgust.

Because their MAGAt base will in fact reel back in disgust if any of those things are proposed. If "the libs" want it, then MAGA is programmed to hate it.
See how the fox piece looks? It has the politicians face, then they let MAGA know the guy is a "lib", likely with the set up talking points. That is all MAGAts need, a face and to know the person is on the other side ... from there anything else mentioned about the person is automatically bad.
- In 3 years Fox news will just show a picture of the political opponent's face with the caption "this guy is a lib" which will send every MAGAt into a murderous rage
- In this case all they needed to know he's bad is to hear his name unfortunately.
I mean, most politicians do.
Groupthink is a real thing
and its evolved over the last few decades.
- Fox News saw the two minutes of hate and thought "why only two minutes?"

Look at this monster.

Yes but many of these would require taxing the rich, which I’m against because I might somehow become rich one day through virtually no effort or understanding of how one becomes rich to begin with

/s

That's it right there. Just mentioning the phrase tax the rich has become enough of a catalyst for the punching down to intensify. Keep the pressure on.

You know they're mad

This is the future that those who are controlling the conservative platform are trying to prevent.

Make no mistake this is and always will be a class war about stealing the value of workers for their own personal gain.

Democrat leadership is also not happy with Mamdani. He isn't following the rules, like David Hogg, or AOC.
- Fuck the establishment Democratic Party reps, run them all out of office because they will never get it. We need a new deal not conservative appeasement.

What a monster! Making the lives of people better, like a maniac!

That's some poor propaganda, comrade fox news. You should've rendered it in Arabic or Chinese to scare them out

Hi I'm a socialist transit worker and I thought free bus fare was a no brainer until I worked in transit, it's an awful idea. Transit cannot function effectively as transit when it is being forced to operate as a mobile shelter and bottle and wagon transit system. Fund shelters and ease the burden shouldered by transit.

(By all means make transit incredibly inexpensively accessible to anyone who needs it)

I apparently wasn't clear enough here, I'm sure there are places where free transit works great because people are so well cared for and general safety is so high that it's not an issue. That sounds wonderful, I want that here. However, I have learned the hard way that transit needs to continue being accessible to the majority even when there are people who have slipped fully into the margins who present hazards to transit customers. (Customers meaning people who need transit to travel)

Point blank, that is not an issue caused by free transit. This is the logical equivalent of saying the school system is broken because people keep showing up to them with guns.
- Point blank, the inability to deny people entry to transit and to use transit as a mobile shelter is having catastrophic impacts on overall transit use. This is the equivalent of saying the school system is broken because people keep showing up at schools and screaming at people, assaulting people, soiling themselves and the facilities and the staff have no ability to separate them or remove them from the school, so the rest of the students get home schooled or private schooled and effectively don't have access to public school. (Oh yeah, and tons of teachers and staff quit)
  They need HELP and a transit system as a shelter and drug safe use space is just about the least efficient way I can imagine to help them and makes it less safe and accessible to everyone else.
Luxemburg has a great free transit system, what you guys need it to deal with homeless people and drug addicts. I mean this in a humanly way, where these people get the help they need.
- Couldn't agree more, a system where the number of homeless drug addicts and marginalized people is so low that we literally don't need to worry about it sounds much better. But in the meantime the people who aren't using the bus as a shelter have a civil right to access to safe and effective transit as well that they are currently not getting and transit is dying because of it. I have no illusions on the ways in which society has failed these people, they are largely foster kids who aged out of the system and people who were only a little on the margins but functional until rent went up AGAIN and they literally couldn't afford to have a place to live anymore and spiraled from there. Free transit won't fix that though, the interim period where free transit doesn't function is very real and valid.
  Also, seriously though, Luxembourg conservatively has less than a twentieth the poverty rate as the US.
well duh. that's not a transit issue, that's a shelter issue.
- Agreed, the problem comes when the issue gets pushed from the shelter system onto the transit system.
Staten Island (the forgotten borough) has a free subway. It works pretty well.
- Never been let alone worked in Staten Island, couldn't tell you if there's more to the story there or not. Sounds great though, hope it stays great. (I do think islands have a decent ability to be insulated from some amount of societal problems that tend to accumulate in city centers, I know the staten island ferry is free but it still may provide some barrier)

Its crazy that NYC still can't afford free public transportation. City literally has more expensive apartments than yearly cost of operating busses.

Free buses aren’t something you really need to “afford” because even in smaller cities the economic value returned through that way of operating is given back and then some. Like, they’ve been throwing free money on the ground for decades upon decades and it’s about time shit catches up to reality.
- Bus fares make up only like 2% of the income for my cities public transit system. They can afford to go free.
The point is you need pretext to remove people who use the system as a living room instead of transit.
- Sure but why would a fee do that? If anything that would encourage this behavior because if I pay 2$ I feel entitled to spend there as much time as I want.
  This is pretty well established theory now in behavior economy:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory
  We already invented the most effective and humane fix for this - social workers. I don't think anything can work better then another person trained in handling social situations correcting the issue themselves.

Of corse they are. All of these things will actually help people.

No wonder establishment democrats tried so hard to stop him.

Huh... that almost sounds like a public... good. Tickle me that.

"Building affordable housing" oh the horror! Who would do such a thing?

Yass Khalifa

I'm seriously shocked the Fox media team didn't bother photoshopping horns on his head, distorting his pleasant, lovely smile into a menacing grimace, or altering his skin color into the brimstone-red spectrum.

Or, to be even more crude, him as a caricature of Mohamad.
(Please don't ban me mods, we live in a world where this could actually happen on national TV).
- just fuckin use a picture of osama bin laden, why spend effort?

Yes yes yes

I'm not quite sure what you're saying. Is the problem the fare evasion or the disproportionate amount of money spent policing fare evasion, with the collateral benefit of terrorizing the citizenry?

Can the subway be fare free aswell?

That's purely done by the MTA and would have to be at the state level. The state legislature and Hochul would have to stop profiting off the subway for that to happen.

This might be a humor magazine, but I'll be honest on my perspective out here in NJ.

That $30 minimum wage thing scares the living daylights out of me, especially with the congestion pricing still in effect. Raising the minimum wage in the City that far will make the already ridiculous costs in NYC skyrocket. It's going to make it functionally impossible for average people who work outside NYC to regularly go in and do things. You know that business owners aren't going to eat the loss of profits, the prices will just go up to match. Rents will go up, costs will go up. I do respect the idea of trying to get to a living wage. I'd love to see a viable plan, but the best way to do it is to keep all costs down, not massively increase labor costs.

I think the bus idea is a better use of tax money than 90% of what NYC has right now, as long as the funds are focused on maintaining vehicles and paying drivers who perform well, rather than lining some suit's bank account. I don't know if that's going to be possible, but hey, the worst that happens is they try it, it fails, and the buses go back to being fare-based.

It's that wage idea that's going to really, really suck.

He's not going to get $30 minimum wage. He's starting high so he can negotiate to a middle ground. He's not going to be King of NYC. He's doesn't just get what he wants that easily.
- Fair enough. He beat the party establishment. If he wins the general, he'll still have to deal with the City establishment. Still, increases in NYC's minimum wage do typically end up hurting those of us stuck in the orbit. So like I said, I'm scared. All I can do is brace for the impact, and hope that the increase in costs don't give NJ business owners ideas about how much more profit they can gouge because of the NYC cost for goods and/or services. Note that I don't actually have high hopes on that. If there's a chance they can make more profit, most places won't risk leaving money on the table. They'll raise the prices, and then lower them partway later on so they're still increased but it feels like a discount.