While Democrats nationwide cheer socialist demands to raise taxes, they simultaneously demonstrate every day how incompetently they spend the money they already take from us.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s fish-eyed smirk in his “tax day” video — smugly gloating, “We’re taxing the rich!” — was just the most extreme recent example of Dem greed.
He insists high-earners “pay their fair share” to fund his dreams of free buses, day care and cheap groceries.
Yet on Monday, The Post offered a painful example of how government simply wastes the billions it already squeezes from taxpayers: Turns out the city rented and built out dozens of day-care centers under Mayor Bill de Blasio that, more than five years later, are sitting empty.
The price tag: a whopping $100 million.
And taxpayers are still shelling out millions a year in rent and utilities for these vacant spaces.
It’s not entirely clear what happened (with government, it never is!), but it seems the city didn’t bother to conduct basic market research: Despite Mamdani’s claims to the contrary, it seems the public is not frantically desperate for free city-run child care in every corner of the city.
Can there be a more convincing illustration of a service better left to the private sector, whose money is at risk when no customers show up?
Meanwhile, dozens of elected Democrats, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Queens) and Dan Goldman (Manhattan) are pushing for a 5% annual wealth tax on the richest 260,000 American households to achieve “basic fairness,” says Warren.
It might help Warren’s argument if her party weren’t so reckless with the trillions of dollars it already spends, with massive cash swirling down the drain as blue states and cities lurch from one wasteful, fraudulent program to another.
California paid out more than $30 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims during the pandemic, at least $1 billion of which went to people in prison.
Minnesota allowed Somali social-service organizations to steal billions through bogus food and child-care programs.
Politicians like Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, who courted Somalis for votes, stood by with their eyes closed and their hands over their ears — blind, deaf and dumb about the looting they facilitated.
Yet they all demand more money.
Sorry: The blue state model of high taxes and expensive social services supposedly for the very poor is strangling hard-working, struggling middle-class Americans who inevitably wind up getting fleeced.
Every other institution in society is required to provide value in exchange for money.
Only government is entitled to squander billions with impunity — and then have lefties cry poverty, hike taxes and . . . rinse and repeat.
When do taxpayers get relief?
