New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s controversial plan for city-owned grocery stores is embarrassingly based on an “accounting error,” the Washington Examiner revealed in a recent report.
The Democrat nominee has defended his idea for socialist markets by saying they can be funded by the money saved from cutting city subsidies to “corporate grocery stores” — but he misunderstood the amount of money the city has.
“We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price-gouging,” Mamdani said in one video:
He claimed that five grocery stores would cost $60 million and would rely on the City Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program.
“That should be compared to the city’s existing program called City FRESH, where they are set to spend $140 million, subsidizing corporate grocery stores … So we would take less than half of the money the city is already set to spend, and actually deliver results,” the candidate explained.
There is one small problem with that plan — Mamdani got that $140 million figure by misreading the city’s webpage, the Examiner’s Tim Carney reported:
The city’s Economic Development Corporation estimates that grocery stores have invested $140 million of their own money thanks to the FRESH program. Mamdani is counting the $140 million in private spending as government spending.
That money was invested not by the city, but by “corporate grocery stores.”
In reality, only about $30 million in tax breaks have been given to stores as part of the program over the same 12-year span.
The graphic from the city’s website that Mamdani appears to have misunderstood was snagged by an X user:
A campaign spokesperson insisted to the New York Post that Mamdani’s math was not wrong, claiming that part of the socialist grocery store plan would be paid for with City FRESH funds, with the rest to come from taxing the rich.
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