BY: DAIMAN TEER for THE SIMPLETON STAR
New York City elected a fantasy, and now it’s going to live inside one, for four long years, whether it likes it or not. Zohran Mamdani did not win City Hall with a plan. He won it with a magic show and facial paralysis frozen in a phony smile — and free buses, frozen rents, city-run grocery stores, a minimum wage yanked skyward, universal everything, all of it paid for by taxing “the rich” until the math sorts itself out, which it never does, anywhere, ever, in the history of governed cities on planet Earth. This isn’t policy. It’s a fairy tale with a payroll number attached, and the invoice is coming whether he’s ready to open it or not.
Here is the truth this unbelievably stupid administration cannot say out loud: generosity with someone else’s money isn’t virtue, it’s theater. Every ribbon-cutting, every press conference, every beaming announcement of a new giveaway is a performance staged for an audience that hasn’t yet been handed the bill. City Hall isn’t a stage. It’s payroll, pensions, crumbling subway tunnels, police overtime, and a tax base that doesn’t have to sit there and take it — it can leave, and it will, quietly, the way money always leaves when the people in charge start treating success like a crime to be punished rather than a asset to be kept.
And blaming “the rich” for every unfixed pothole and unfunded promise is the laziest trick in the book, because it costs the person saying it nothing. It’s not courage. It’s not vision. It’s a scapegoat dressed up as a policy platform, deployed by someone who would rather be applauded than be accurate. The wealthy don’t owe this city their permanent residence, and every time City Hall makes staying more expensive than leaving, a few more of them do the arithmetic Mamdani refuses to and quietly disappear from the tax rolls, taking the money that was supposed to fund all these promises with them.
None of this seems to trouble him. He glides through it, unbothered, radiating a kind of serene, untouchable confidence that only comes from never having had to actually balance a budget in your life. That’s the real danger here — not malice, just a total absence of consequence in his own mind. He is not lying awake wondering how this gets paid for. That’s for someone else to figure out later, probably the bus driver, the shopkeeper, and the family that just wanted an apartment they could afford and instead got a slower, poorer, more broken city standing on a foundation of applause.
New York has survived bad mayors but not as bad as this dunce. It has survived worse ideas dressed up as compassion but not as stupid as the ones put forward by this guy who simply does not like white people. But a city cannot run forever on borrowed optimism and someone else’s money, and when the bill finally lands — and it will — it will not land on the man who wrote it.
Scripture Reflection
Proverbs 21:5 (NIV)
“The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.”
Why This Scripture Was Chosen
Proverbs 21:5 condemns exactly this pattern: governance driven by haste, applause, and good feeling rather than diligence and honest accounting. A leader who mistakes generosity for wisdom is building poverty, not prosperity, no matter how good the promises sound on the way down.
A Prayer for the City
Heavenly Father, Giver of Wisdom,
We pray for the City of New York, burdened now with promises it may not be able to keep. Grant its leaders the humility to face hard numbers honestly, and the courage to choose the harder truth over the easier applause.
Protect the working families, the small shopkeepers, and the everyday people who did not write these promises but will be asked to pay for them. Shield this city from the slow decay that follows generosity without a plan.
Give us patience as we watch and wait to see what these promises cost, and strength to endure it if the bill comes due.
In Your Holy Name we pray,
Amen.
