Socialism, Government Groceries & the Road to Florida
The promise: affordability for working people. The payment plan: somebody else, sometime later.
In our last installment, socialism had discovered animal welfare. The pigeons were advised to remain alert.
Now New York is providing another lesson in the distance between a magnificent promise and an inconvenient bill.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated closing what his administration described as an inherited $12 billion budget gap. Albany’s roughly $8 billion package of assistance and financial flexibility helped—including aid, tax authorization and pension relief. Not money discovered beneath the cushions of
capitalist oppression.
Somehow, the revolution still requires financing.
Part of the pension restructuring stretches repayment of affected obligations from 2032 to 2037. Bloomberg reported an actuarial estimate of approximately $5 billion in additional payments over time. The comptroller describes the structure as neutral in present-value terms: lower payments now and higher payments later, rather than an obligation that has miraculously disappeared.
Apparently, the route to affordability runs through a longer repayment schedule. The Police Pension Fund did not approve the restructuring; but four other 'union bosses', including the Fire Pension Fund, did.
Consider the firefighter who could earn more elsewhere but chooses public service partly because of retirement security. The pension is part of the bargain, not a courtesy gift from whichever politician happens to occupy City Hall. Imagine the recruitment pitch:
You run into burning buildings. We will run the retirement obligations into the next decade.
Wonderful. Can the firefighter reschedule the fire?
Who in his right mind would knowingly trade a safer, better-paying opportunity for a retirement promise whose financial backing politicians treat as a convenient source of budget relief?
An IOU is a splendid retirement plan—provided the government grocery store accepts one.
There is another revealing detail. NBC New York reported that City Hall eased a cash crunch by postponing a $3.7 billion contribution to the Retiree Health Benefits Trust until December 2026, while unexpectedly strong tax collections, supported substantially by Wall Street profits, provided breathing room. The administration said retirees’ benefits would not be affected.
How fortunate that the financial sector continued producing taxable profits. Capitalism: an intolerable arrangement until its tax payment clears.
Meanwhile, ordinary households cannot move this month’s grocery bill into 2037. New York-area consumer prices were 4.3 percent higher in August 2026 than a year earlier. Food prices rose 3.3 percent; energy prices, 15.4 percent.
The retiree needs groceries. The firefighter needs housing. The working parent needs electricity.
None of them can pay with a denunciation of billionaires.
And when inflation slows, previous price increases do not politely reverse themselves. “Your bills are increasing less quickly” is not the same sentence as “your life has become affordable. Perhaps City Hall could explain the distinction at a supermarket checkout. Bring a campaign sign. See whether the cashier accepts it.
Or, better yet, open a government grocery store.
Mamdani’s administration has committed $70 million in capital funding for five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough—because the institution stretching the payment schedule on existing obligations should obviously add bananas to its balance sheet.
Supporters argue that public ownership can reduce costs and improve access. Fine. Then publish the full cost per customer, the continuing subsidy and the results. A lower price at the register does not prove the underlying cost disappeared. Sometimes it simply means another taxpayer picked it up.
The grocery receipt gets shorter. The government’s involvement gets longer. Naturally, only one of those documents makes the campaign advertisement.
Florida, meanwhile, has pursued a markedly different approach for nearly three decades.
Florida has no state personal income tax. Its 2026–27 budget announcement reports nearly $18 billion in reserves, AAA credit ratings from the major agencies and substantial debt reduction. Florida also eliminated its commercial rent tax.
Lower taxes. Financial reserves. Paying down obligations.
An outrageously unfashionable concept: make the government’s promises fit the resources available to honor them.
Florida is not perfect, and a Republican super-majority label alone should never exempt state government from scrutiny. But on taxes and fiscal management, its governing approach runs in the opposite direction from the New York city-and-state package of assistance, revenue authority and postponed obligations.
I wonder which approach will appeal to the people expected to finance government.
There is already a substantial southbound traffic report: Census-based figures compiled by USAFacts show that approximately 50,700 people moved from New York State to Florida in 2024 alone. It demonstrates that the people expected to finance New York’s promises already have options.
A separate MovingPlace study reported by News 6 identified Florida as the leading destination state for people leaving New York City, receiving nearly 17 percent of the departures it tracked. The Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach metropolitan area ranked second among destination metros; Orlando and Tampa also appeared prominently.
Palm Beach County’s financial-sector growth has even acquired an official economic-development brand: Wall Street South. Apparently, firms can distinguish between being welcomed as employers and being appreciated primarily as a revenue source.
But this is not exclusively a story about hedge funds and waterfront mansions.
The MovingPlace study did not find the predicted surge in wealthy departures following Mamdani’s primary victory. Across departures to all destinations, it recorded far more people in its broad under-$200,000 income category than among those earning over $201,000. That is not a poverty definition. It does establish that the moving vans are carrying considerably more than billionaires’ furniture.
An affordability problem that predates a mayor still requires an answer from that mayor.
Families do not need a seminar on political economy to compare housing costs, taxes, employment prospects and the possibility of having something left after paying the bills.
The forwarding address is a perfectly serviceable form of feedback.
Floridians also recognize that this debate does not stop at the state line. DSA-affiliated democrat-party candidacies are already part of Florida’s 2026 elections. This is not merely a distant argument about somebody else’s city.
Apparently, receiving New York’s residents is insufficient. We should also consider importing the governing philosophy they are being asked to finance.
What could possibly go wrong?
Florida is home to many people who fled communist Cuba and the former Eastern Bloc. For those who experienced shortages and rationing firsthand, promises of government-managed abundance are not exciting discoveries. They have heard the same sales pitch.
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance describes how communist control over trade and economic priorities damaged ordinary living standards, left goods unavailable and produced enormous queues whenever deliveries arrived. The government claimed to represent workers while making their daily lives unbearable.
Ask people who remember organizing their lives around finding basic food—standing in line for hours, hoping there would still be bread, beans or whatever had arrived when their turn came.
Those were not queues for a limited-edition pastry. They were trying to feed their kids.
No, five municipally owned stores do not turn Manhattan into Havana. Nor does every public expenditure constitute communism. But that obvious distinction does not make historical experience irrelevant—or require people who lived through shortages to applaud every new proposal for expanding government’s role in feeding them.
The promise was abundance. The experience included empty shelves.
The promise was dignity for workers. Workers were told to wait.
The branding may improve. The obligation to produce something people can actually eat remains stubbornly unchanged.
So which state will be better positioned over the long term: the one preserving reserves, reducing taxes and attracting investment—or the one celebrating financial relief that includes postponing obligations while adding taxpayer-supported ventures?
The suspense is unbearable.
And knowing all of this, how could any Floridian in their right mind vote to import these policies without demanding a convincing explanation of why the results would be different here?
We have the migration figures. We have the payment schedules. We have neighbors who remember the bread lines. We do not need another magnificent slogan.
We can welcome the people without importing the policy manual.
