Novi SadOkay, but New York (City) is different, bro, I promise
papalonianKinda like how California’s aka “Commie-fornia” crazy outlandish socialist policies have condemned the state to being like the 5th largest economy in the world. It’s being ran into the ground!
UnderpantsWeevilThe idea that California is more than lukewarm liberal has always been one of the biggest lies of American politics. The state has barely budged from its Reagan Era in terms of real public policy. The Silicon Valley sector all just put on “We love Bill Clinton” merch back in the 90s, because he was nice enough not to bust up the telecom and OS monopolies when he had the chance.
Dianne Feinstein raised the Confederate Flag over San Fransisco, practically before Harvey Milk’s body was cold. Gavin Newsom’s been at war with the homeless longer than George Bush has had us at war with Terror. From Duncan Hunter to Devin Nunes to Darrell Issa, the state’s put up some of the most naked fascists in Congress.
California’s political scene is slightly to the left of United Russia. They’re as Communist as a Pinkerton at a Picket Line.
It’s wild how much more billionaires are spending to defeat Zohran than what his tax proposal would cost them. I guess they’re afraid of a wider movement.
That is exactly it.
I have much fun remindng people today that the time when “America was Great” aka the 1950’s also saw the medican tax rate on the ultra-wealthy at over 90%. It’s a rough third of that now since most are earning wealth through non-taxable investment vehicles and not taxable income-based earnings.
Lotsa paper tigers out there…
And they could still afford to lobby to get their taxes lowered and deregulate their industries, so clearly 90% wasn’t enough!
Well, it’s been 70 years now, so it’s not as if the rich haven’t been playing the long game.
Rivalarrival91% was the top-tier tax rate, not the median. Nobody paid that rate: Those who would find themselves in that top tax bracket increased their spending on “business expenses” rather than cut punitively large checks to the IRS. Those “business expenses” were for products and services produced by workers; those “business expenses” paid worker salaries. The high marginal tax rates drove money out of the hands of the ultra-rich and straight into the pockets of the working class. Turns out that paying workers for their labor is more valuable to the ultra-rich than giving away their excess earnings to the IRS. We need to restore the punitively high top-tier tax rates we had from the 1950s to the early 1970s, to drive more cash back into the working class.
But more importantly, we need to institute an annual, 1% tax on all registered securities. To keep the rich from playing fuck-fuck games, that tax should be paid in shares of the securities held, not the dollar value of those securities.
Natural persons may exempt up to $10 million worth of securities from this tax. Corporate “persons” may not exempt their portfolios. If you’ve got $20 million in your portfolio, you need to find another natural person, or start paying.
The SEC transfers non-exempt shares directly to the IRS; the IRS liquidates those shares on the open market, slowly over time. These liquidated shares will never comprise more than 1% of total traded volume.
Source on that? There have to be quite a few billionaires in NYC, how much are they spending on that anti-Zohran campaign?
how much are they spending on that anti-Zohran campaign?
Depends on if you accept that the Cuomo campaign and the “anti-Zohran campaign” describe the same thing…
And how much did they spend on that? It’s kind of difficult to find current numbers through a quick web search, especially if you aren’t super familiar with US election systems.
especially
I’d say anyone even slightly familiar with US politics would know billionaires have lots of ways to obfuscate campaign donations…
Like, it’s not exactly a secret, and US politics are kind of unavoidable.
Sure, but this is a rather specific claim that seems a little hard to believe. You’re telling me they’re spending billions on a mayor campaign?
You’re telling me they’re spending billions
No…
I think you’re confused
LumidaubBut how much ARE they spending then? And why? I’m not from the US either and I’m baffled at the media attention this mayoral election is getting.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/06/09/cuomo-super-pac-fix-the-city-donations/
Under New York City laws that aim to curb the potential for or appearance of pay-to-play corruption, nobody on the city’s official list of companies and individuals doing, or even seeking, business with the city can give more than $400 to a citywide candidate in any election cycle.
But there’s another option: so-called independent expenditure committees, New York’s version of super PACS, that allow deep-pocketed players to spend unlimited amounts of money backing one candidate. And this election cycle, the overwhelming beneficiary of such spending has been former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — and those seeking to influence the vote in his favor.
mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo has received $10.8 million in total contributions to his Super PAC “Fix The City”.
A few “fun” snippets here:
donor Scott Rechler, chairman and CEO of RXR Realty, a major player in New York City’s ultra-competitive real estate market.
On March 13, Rechler wrote a $2,100 check to Cuomo’s campaign. The campaign promptly refunded him $1,700, bringing his donation in line with the $400 limit on “doing business” donors. Rechler had landed on the list two months earlier regarding the Hall Street project.
But Rechler wasn’t finished. The very next day he wrote a much more impressive check of $250,000 to Fix the City, an independent expenditure committee that is aggressively supporting Cuomo’s bid for City Hall.
Arker also owns a company called Progressive Management of New York and a limited liability corporation called Chateau GC LLC. On April 23, the day after Arker wrote his $400 check to the Cuomo campaign, Progressive and Chateau each wrote $25,000 checks to Fix The City.
The tell
the Cuomo campaign and Fix The City have already been accused of improper coordination on the spending side.
The city Campaign Finance Board made such an accusation last month when it withheld nearly $1.3 million in public matching funds from Cuomo’s campaign, finding that a Fix the City ad plugging Cuomo’s candidacy was nearly identical to language on the campaign’s official website.
Some more:
In addition to Fix The City, a landlord group, the New York Apartment Association, last week announced the formation of an independent expenditure committee called Housing For All, promising to spend $2.5 million to support the former governor’s mayoral bid.
24 entities who are currently on the “doing business” list wrote checks to Fix The City ranging from $5,000 to $1 million
They include corporations such as DoorDash ($1 million), Lyft ($25,000), Charter Communications ($125,000) and major real estate developers The Durst Organization ($100,000) and Two Trees Management ($250,000) — entities that are strictly prohibited from giving any amount to campaigns.
To date (NOTE BY ME: that date was June, 4 months ago) Fix The City has spent $5.6 million in support of Cuomo’s City Hall bid and has more recently launched negative ads against his main rival Zohran Mamdani. That includes $1.29 million to air a video ad that included text the CFB found mirrored text that existed on an obscure page within the Cuomo campaign’s website.
In short, its really hard to know how much is being spent, because they can hide it in all kinds of ridiculous ways.
Tens of millions of dollars have been spent in easily tracked money. There’s more being spent that isnt as easily tracked.
… how much do you think Zohran’s plans are going to cost them?
In taxes, about a few billion annually. 2% increase in income tax on over $1 million, 11% at the top of the corporate tax bracket. To be clear about the brackets, they would be paying more on amounts over $1 million, you pay the percentage for each bracket.
So not devastating their profits at all, they would still be raking it in.
Long term he could be representative of a larger shift in approach, especially among blue states (where the overwhelming majority of profits can be found). Again, not devastating to profits or income, just making the ultra wealthy pay their part.
Massachusetts has a similar approach now which has given them around $5 billion annually.
That’s what I thought. I really doubt they’re spending anywhere close to that on the current campaign.
Easy, you don’t target just the city. Or one campaign. Or even a campaign, there are some who set up the same sort of PAC - not to get a candidate elected, but specifically to oppose him getting elected.
If they were targeting just NYC, do you think you’d know this much about mamdani?
That said, some billionaires spent another $20+ million just last week. Some went to campaigns, some went to opposing mamdani. That was last week, and only some of the billionaires. Anti-trans and anti-immigrant groups are donating and running ads elsewhere. They are lobbying against mamdani and other for Cuomo in DC to try and get those reps to make statements.
Official spending? Not remotely near a billion. I’d say the campaign has officially spent $20mil or less.
Unofficial spending is going to be quite a bit more. I don’t think its in the multiple billions, no. But I would say its a safe assumption to put it in the hundreds of millions.
hundreds of millions < what Mamdani’s policies are probably going to cost them
I don’t believe I ever said otherwise, so I have n9 idea what you’re driving at.
If they aren’t spending billions, the claim that billionaires are spending more money on the anti-Mamdani/pro-Cuomo campaigns than Mamdani’s policies would cost them is flat-out wrong.
So…
You think that Mamdani’s policies will cost multiple people over a billion dollars?
Facts:
They are billionaires.
Mamdani will raise their taxes
Assumptions:
A. They are likely spending more on Cuomo’s campaign then they would pay in taxes
B. This is because if Mamdani’s policies are successful they’d see wider adoption.
Besides the fact that you somehow think the taxes will cost any single person a billion dollars, the big flaw is you think the office of the NYC mayor is the full war, and not just a battle.
Billionaires will spend more than Mamdani will cost them, because they see it as a single battle in a very long class war. Win or lose the battle, they will keep fighting the war
You think that Mamdani’s policies will cost multiple people over a billion dollars?
Do you think that I think that multiple people are spending over a billion dollars each? Obviously not. But collectively, probably?
Billionaires will spend more than Mamdani will cost them
I haven’t seen so much as a hint of evidence for this.
It’s wild how much more billionaires are spending to defeat Zohran than what his tax proposal would cost them.
It’s not about beating Zohran once for a single term. It’s about beating the idea of a socialist mayor out of the voting public for another generation. A win for Zohran isn’t just a single seat in a single city. There’s half a dozen House Reps at play (chief among them Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s seat). There’s state House and Senate seats. There’s the very real possibility of an insurgent campaign to unseat Kathy Hochul or threaten the increasingly unpopular Senator Gilibrand.
He’s a crack in the dam. And at the size and scale of NYC, its a fucking big one.
Early voting has already started. The final day to vote is Nov 4th.
You think this is big?
Wait till you see what they put behind Newsom/Pritzker if neither of them win the next Dem presidential primary…
They’re 100% going to pull a Cuomo if a progressive wins. I expect they’ll even get Kamala to run in the primary, just as a sacrificial lamb so Newsom/Pritzker won’t be the the least progressive on stage.
Really the reason they’re so scared of Mamdani, is there’s enough time to show it works before the presidential primary. And the current DNC chair is a huge fan of Mamdani:
One is, he campaigned for something. And this is a critical piece. We can’t just be in a perpetual state of resisting Donald Trump. Of course, we have to resist Donald Trump. There’s no doubt about it for all the reasons we just talked about. But we also have to give people a sense of what we’re for, what the Democratic Party is fighting for, and what we would do if they put us back in power.
And that’s really critical. And I think that’s one of the lessons from Mamdani’s campaign, is that he focused on affordability. He focused on a message that was resonant with voters, and he campaigned for something, not against other people or against other things. He campaigned on a vision of how he was going to make New York City a better place to live.
pbs.org/…/dnc-chair-on-the-path-to-winning-back-v…
Billionaires are shitting themselves, they’ll just never let the media they own report on it.
DNC chair on the path to winning back voters and lessons Democrats can learn from Mamdani
Democratic Party officials are looking at the Big Beautiful Bill as a political gift and hoping voters view cuts to social spending negatively. But the party faces challenges ahead of the midterms, including a Republican trifecta and a base questioning if party leadership is doing enough to challenge President Trump. Amna Nawaz discussed where the party goes next with DNC Chair Ken Martin.
SundrayI guess they’re afraid of a wider movement.
Yes! And, taxes are abhorrent to their sense of justice. It’s disgusting.
One time fee vs forever more. These guys think in terms of the long game, not the 4 year cycles your government is concerned with.
edgemaster72For their personal finance, yes. Running a company? Line go up this quarter, nothing else matters. Slowly destroying the planet and poisoning the population? Irrelevant, line must go up.
I think what’s funny is like when Washington tried this a few years ago the tax only affected 14 people in the entire state.
So like, could I see 14 people fleeing? Sure.
But also, why do 14 people have that much fucking money.
𝔗𝚎𝚑 𝔅𝚊𝚖𝚜𝚔𝚒But also, why do 14 people have that much fucking money.
That’s because their bootstraps were much more enormous then others around them. So they had to put in more work into pulling them up. So they deserve much more money than the other 99% of people. /s
“You can’t take it with you” is as true about death as it is about taxes.
If I’ve got a $5M home in Beacon Hill and I decide to flee to Texas because the taxes are cheaper, who the fuck am I going to sell it to? Another guy with $5M in his pocket? Or am I just going to eat a seven figure loss to save $10k/year on income taxes?
What if I’ve got a $50M tower block? Or a $500M corporate HQ? How about a $5B warehousing district in Boston Harbor? You think I’m going to just pick that shit up and move it to Louisiana?
GladaedYou discount the most important bit: laborer availability, service availability and quality of life. Also productivity.
You cannot just move when you require a large amount of people and services.
There’s no shortage of people living in the American southwest. And quite a few of them are cheap to hire, even at a professional level.
But there’s also a bunch of competing American billionaires who have bought up all the real estate and political base of these remote locations. The CEO of Fidelity can’t just pick up from Boston and move to San Antonio, because her wealth and authority is predicated on her influence in Boston. Even if she were to transplant every one of her staffers down south (and Exxon hemorrhaged thousands of staffers when they tried this back in the 1980s), she still won’t have the office space or the political connections or the business relationships that make Fidelity an bedrock institution up north. FFS, half the reason Fidelity is up there is the proximity to Wall Street. Texas has been trying to lure stock brokerages down south for decades without success.
But it’s like trying to pick up a 3000 year old Redwood from California and drag it to Florida. You’ve got roots, bro. They don’t come free easily or without a price. And there’s a reason competing businesses aren’t already down there. The climate is all wrong.
MinnesotaGoddamthey aren’t going to flee to texas over taxes because texas has a higher taxes (overall, not just income)
BeesbeesbeesYeah cause in reality they don’t want to be living in Alabama if they have a heart attack.
Why for the love of God does anyone listen to a Republican or take anything they say as having any value. They do not govern, they lie and manipulate and steal all the money and children. Stop letting them be in the government.
When you have the memory of a goldfish, there’s no such thing as lying. Every statement is true, and therefore every expense is valid and all those children are illegal criminals.
The party that spent decades eliminating critical thinking skills in their supporters now thrives because of that undertaking. It would be impressive if it weren’t so disastrous.
Claiming the rich will flee is such a dumbass take, just on the face of it. They’re rich. And they want to live in NYC, which (*checks notes*) ain’t exactly cheap to begin with. They can afford to live wherever the fuck they want, money is no object. So if it costs a bit more to live in NYC, what difference does it make? Allegedly the whole point of even being rich is to be able to afford the things you want.
But if it makes folks feel better, maybe call it New York Platinum Edition™?
They need us so much more than we need them…there’s 2 of them for every 100,000 of us ffs
(Obvious exaggeration for effect)
(Obvious exaggeration for effect)
I was actually curious what the ratio is for normal vs rich in the US. If we look at who we call rich, we need to set a boundary first. A normal family that saves and invests right should retire at just over a million dollars. If you have a well paying job even 4-5 million is very attainable. Then you look at people with a well paying job in an expensive city, like what this post is centered around, we could realistically see someone as affluent but not truly rich at about 10 million. I would draw the line there though. To attain more than that by retirement age, you were definitely rich and living rich at some point in there, even in a big city.
A quick search tells me that there are about 900,000 people in the US above that number, possibly more depending on whose number you take, but I think the best study put it there. The population is about 340,000,000. If we put this as a ratio trying to figure out 1:xxxx people and move some numbers around we end up with 1 rich person (over $10M) for every 378 normal people (under $10M).
You know what is fucked? People have been saying the same shit for centuries. FDR even had a radio announcement where he responded to the claim that if you raise the taxes on the rich they will simply pack up and go. He said ‘well then… so long!’
And they never did btw. Where are they going to go anyway?
Its pretty bizarre to treat rich people like they’re some incredible credit to their communities simply for existing.
No no, it doesn’t rub, it trickles. 🙄
They really do believe that having a lot of money is divine providence and that it means they are blessed by God.
NatakuNoxIs that Sam Reich’s dad?
That is in fact Sam Reich’s dad. Less importantly, he is also former secretary of labor.
They might not be American. Or know of leaser known figures in politics
I can’t be too harsh on them. I’m pretty sure I new Sam Reich before his father too. Dropout has been getting popular. They did an episode of Breaking News where Robert got a short snippet to poke fun at his son.