Last night, the newly elected next Mayor of America’s largest city, NYC, Zohran Mamdani, started his 2028 Democratic Party campaign for the U.S. Presidential nomination, by his acceptance speech, against Donald Trump. He threw down the gauntlett to the national Republican Party.
The U.S. Republican Party’s Fox News Network — on the morning of November 5th, just after Mamdani’s landslide win Tuesday, of New York City’s Mayoralty — telecast that “Here in New York, 1% of the population pay 48% of the income tax. Capital goes where it’s treated best. If he’s going to pay for all these handouts …”
Nothing was said about “all those handouts” to billionaires.
One of the underlying assumptions in their saying this was that the richest 1% of NYC residents pay 48% of the taxes because of discrimination against them, not because those people draw approximately 48% of the NYC population’s annual income.
Another of their underlying assumptions in saying this was that taxation should be either regressive (set at a higher percentage on the poor than on the rich) or else flat (set at an equal percentage on the poor as on the rich), but definitely NOT progressive (set at a higher percentage on the rich than on the poor).
Fox News there was factually correct that “1% of the population pay 48% of the income tax” according to the City Comptroller’s office in 2023, its “Spotlight: NYC Personal Income Tax 2019-2021”, which said:
The distribution of NYC PIT [Personal Income Tax] liability is shown in Chart S3. In 2021, the top 1 percent of tax filers accounted for 48 percent of NYC PIT liability, a share that has grown from 40 percent in 2019. While a small number of people pay a large share of personal income tax, the same top 1 percent of tax filers also earned 43 percent of all the income in 2021. This has been mainly a result of the large increases in capital gains realized by the top 0.1% of filers.
Furthermore:
The available data for the first two pandemic years shows income gains and increased personal income tax liabilities that are dominated by capital gains realizations and concentrated among the top 1% of tax filers. The highest income New Yorkers saw immense gains due to large stock market gains while lower income New Yorkers were at first buoyed by federal aid in 2020 but then lost income in 2021 when it expired.
As regards the Republican Party’s statement that “Capital goes where it’s treated best,” it is true under an entirely ‘free-market’ economy, but not necessarily under a one-person-one-vote democratic polity, and the Republican Party favors the former, and actively opposes the latter. Here is what the U.S. Constitution itself says about this matter:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Furthermore, that happens to be this Constitution’s Preamble, which is the most important part of the Constitution because it asserts the fundamental intention that motivated everything else in the Constitution and is therefore, if the U.S. Supreme Court is to be interpreting all the rest of the Constitution in accord with the collective intent of its authors — the members of the Constitutional Convention, who collectively voted on each of its passages and so WROTE the document, WERE its original intent — then the U.S. Supreme Court will interpret each and every one of the document’s OTHER clauses IN LIGHT OF this intent (that collective intent, of those people), as being the U.S. Constitution’s Original Intent, the intent of the U.S. Constitution’s authors. After all, they WERE the people who WROTE it. Whose intent stood behind its very words? Its AUTHORS’ intent did. The voters on it in the individual state conventions didn’t: they merely approved the entire document, but they didn’t WRITE it. And the original intent of the U.S. Constitution was Revolutionary, it was the most progressive Constitution that had ever been written.
So, “In Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” there must be limitations upon any ‘free market’ so as to prevent the country from being or becoming ruled by its billionaires (now counting approximately 1,000 persons nationwide in the U.S.). Our Founders fought and risked their lives in their Revolution (which, if they had lost their Revolution, they would likely have lost their lives too) against Britain’s aristocracy, not in order to establish an American aristocracy here (another dictatorship), but to establish instead a democracy here (as the only great Republican Abraham Lincoln said, it was “of the people, by the people, for the people”), and this was to be established under this Preamble, which very much includes its “general Welfare” two-word Clause, which the Republican Party of today hates because they want instead a one-dollar-one-vote aristocracy here (in which a person’s worth is his or her net worth in dollars — that individual’s wealth), like in a corporation’s one-share-one-vote rule, which achieves a dictatorship by the corporation’s controlling stockholders; they do NOT want a one-person-one-vote rule here, which our Founders wanted in order to achieve the “general Welfare.” They wanted a democracy here, NOT a ‘free market’ (such as America’s billionaires and the Republican Party of today advocate for). The Preamble proves this. (For example, though most of the Members at the Constitutional Convention wanted to eliminate slavery, that would have meant southern states rejecting the Constitution. So, this problem had to wait until Abraham Lincoln to become resolved.)
John Wilkes Booth’s bullet transformed Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party into what soon became (starting wth President McKinley) the Party of America’s billionaires. Donald Trump personifies THAT Republican Party. Zohran Mamdani is leading what he hopes will become restored to being the Democratic Party of America’s Founders, AGAINST that billionaires’ Party — and against today’s billionaires-controlled Democratic Party (ANY aristocracy) in order for America to become “Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
And that is why both of today’s Parties are against him, and why they have constantly been lying against him. They don’t want what happened yesterday in New York Cty to become what will happen across America. They want to nip it in the bud.
This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.
