Mamdani's racial equity plan a hidden 'moving the goalposts' ploy to justify massive gov expansion: expert
New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is "moving the goalposts" on poverty in the nation’s largest city with his newly unveiled racial equity plan to justify a massive expansion...
By Fox News · Fox News
New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is "moving the goalposts" on poverty in the nation’s largest city with his newly unveiled racial equity plan to justify a massive expansion of government intervention, a top city policy analyst warns. Mamdani released his "Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan" earlier this month, which quickly received pushback from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department as well as from the Manhattan Institute’s Santiago Vidal Calvo, who told Fox News Digital that when the report uses a "true cost of living" to claim 62% of New Yorkers can’t make ends meet in the city, it’s a ploy to declare a crisis that needs more government. "What he’s essentially doing is moving the goalposts," Vidal Calvo explained. "He’s essentially saying that what the federal government qualifies as somebody below the poverty line — which is essentially like $34,000, $35,000 a year, those might be like 2024 numbers, but it’s pretty close to that — we’re essentially moving the goalposts so anybody under $160,000 with children cannot afford to live in New York City." "Those numbers, in reality, if you live in New York City, they don’t sound crazy, they don’t sound, you know, high. But in all of reality, for any single person across America, $160,000 is, you know, a breadwinner. It’s essentially enough money to raise a family and to have children and to have a good life. So when we move the goalposts into that direction, without actually recognizing what are the underlying issues of the disease, what are the actual problems that make New York City expensive, then we’re just attributing a problem and throwing a dart at the board and saying, 'This is it.'" MAMDANI RIPPED AFTER CONCEDING KEY CAMPAIGN PLEDGE WON'T HAPPEN THIS YEAR The "reality" of the situation, Vidal Calvo says, is that you "don’t make a place more affordable by making people earn more" but instead the city needs to "ask the right questions" about policies that drive wage growth and new housi…