New Yorkers Deserve Stark Choice between Communist and Capitalist for Mayor

With Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, and Curtis Sliwa on the ballot, New York City’s choices for mayor are a self-styled democratic socialist, a social democrat, and a capitalist. How non-binary.

Gotham voters deserve sharply contrasting mayoral options. To that end, Cuomo should wave goodbye and bequeath New Yorkers a stark, Communist vs. Capitalist choice on Election Day.

Former Empire State governor Cuomo botched the June 24 Democrat primary. Mamdani, then an unknown state assemblyman from Queens, stunned the man with the household name — 43.9 percent to 36.2 percent.

Alas, Cuomo could not take a hint. He is harder to shake than psoriasis. Shame on him for staying in this race.

Cuomo is no centrist knight, riding to New York City’s rescue. He is an approaching-the-precipice Leftist, even if not an over-the-cliff, plunging-to-the-desert-floor Marxist-Leninist. (RELATED: The Democrats Choose the World Over America)

• Cuomo kissed the career-criminal class on both cheeks at the Global Citizen Festival on September 29, 2018. “Rikers Island has to be closed, and it has to be closed now!” Cuomo shouted in Central Park, long before it was cool to denounce this local prison.

• Cuomo also announced at this event: “We’re going to end the cash-bail system, once and for all.” Cuomo signed the 2019 state budget, complete with language that scrapped cash bail for misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, no matter how extensive a criminal’s rap sheet.

In 2015, Cuomo began an ultimately successful campaign to padlock the Indian Point atomic-power plant in Westchester. Unfortunately, he had no plan to replace its 2,000 megawatts of electricity.

And from 1997 to 2001, as Bill Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development secretary, Cuomo planted the weeds that eventually overwhelmed the mortgage market and prompted the 2007-08 financial meltdown. Veteran banking analyst Dick Bove called Cuomo the “father of the subprime crisis.” Bove told CNBC: “It’s also thought by many that the hundreds of thousands of people who are losing their homes are [doing so] to a great degree because of the actions taken by Mr. Cuomo at HUD.”

CNBC explained that Cuomo “has been blamed in some quarters for helping to trigger the financial crisis by pushing Fannie and Freddie to buy more subprime mortgages to increase home ownership among the poor. Many of those homeowners eventually defaulted, and the mortgage-backed securities market later collapsed.”

Unforgivably, Cuomo ordered nursing homes to admit COVID-positive senior citizens and even prohibited these facilities from mandating COVID tests for seemingly healthy entrants. The totally predictable result: the COVID-positive elderly innocently transmitted it to COVID-negative seniors; 8,711 of the latter got infected and died, the Cuomo administration reported.

But that number turned out to be a lie. Attorney General Letitia James (D-New York) revealed on Jan. 28, 2021, that the real death toll was 12,743 — 46.3 percent higher. Evidently, Team Cuomo minimized his nursing-home carnage to camouflage his deadly incompetence and, thus, protect the $4 million cash advance that Crown Publishing paid him to pen a book about his pandemic “leadership.”

With a bold anti-Mamdani attack ad as his swan song (which he quickly chickened out and deleted), Cuomo should exit this campaign and enter a prison cell for negligent homicide.

Gotham voters deserve a clear choice on Election Day (Image generated by Deroy Murdock via ChatGPT, Oct. 26, 2025)

A Mamdani-Sliwa face-off would let New Yorkers pick between two distinct visions, not least on taxes. (RELATED: This Is Why Sliwa Can’t Save NY By Not Showing Up to the Fight)

Mamdani cannot wait to give New Yorkers tax hikes — good and hard. He wants “the top 1 percent of New Yorkers” firmly in his embrace. Hoover Institution scholar David R. Henderson calculates that a married couple who earn more than $1 million annually and file jointly would see their local taxes soar from 3.876 percent to 5.876 percent. This is not the “2 percent” increase that Mamdani breezily peddles. (That would be a mild rise to 3.953 percent.) His threatened increase of two full percentage points would boost this couple’s tax bill by 51.6 percent — a hike that borders on domestic abuse. (RELATED: New Yorkers Will Pay the Price for Mamdani’s Hubris)

As for the business sector, Mamdani wants the top state corporate tax rate to skyrocket from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent — up 58.6 percent. Such exorbitant levies would send companies running and repel incoming entrepreneurs like sparrows avoiding scarecrows. (RELATED: Zohran Has Two Daddies)

Conversely, Sliwa would sing from the Trump-Giuliani-Reagan-JFK-Coolidge tax-cut hymnal — perfectly timed for the 50th anniversary of the Laffer Curve.

“I will make it so that, for senior citizens who are 65 and older, they will be paying no property tax,” Sliwa told Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo on October 19.

For those just starting their careers, Sliwa said: “For young men and young women, 19 to 28, who have just graduated college and have the skills that our industry needs, a holiday from income tax. They shouldn’t have to pay because they’re fleeing, too.”

As for New York’s overtaxed companies. Sliwa’s website pledges to “Reduce NYC’s general corporate income tax rate from 8.85 percent to 6.00 percent” — down 32.2 percent — “to compete with cities like Boston (8.0), Chicago (7.0), and Miami (5.50).”

And, to stimulate jobs, Sliwa would give employers a $7,500 tax credit for each local graduate hired and retained for at least two years “in industries like finance, tech, healthcare, education, logistics, and trades.”

With nothing to lose, Sliwa should cut taxes even lower:

• Sliwa should go beyond this list of industries eligible for these $7,500 new-hire tax credits. Why not offer them to museums, bars, restaurants, comedy clubs, and theatrical companies? Sliwa should expand his fine idea across Gotham’s entire private-sector economy.

• Homeowners may write off their mortgage-interest payments against their taxes. That’s lovely — for homeowners. How about renters? What if they could write off at least a portion of their rent payments? Even a partial, local-tax deduction would give renters residential tax relief, which homeowners have treasured, essentially since 1913.

This would leave more money in renters’ hands — to spend, save, or invest. Most important, it would not go to City Hall, to be wasted on crazy, Left-wing nonsense.

NYC is drowning in retail vacancies, including huge, flagship storefronts, massive restaurants, and other enormous, empty spaces. They ooze sadness and soon vanish behind boarded-up windows, and often get mutilated with graffiti. Unattended, adjacent sidewalks devolve into pop-up shelters, mini-drug dens, and open-air toilets for bums. (Oops! Make that “the unhoused.”) The quality of life plunges down the chute, and all else follows.

Sliwa should announce that any business that revitalizes a space that has stood empty for all least one year would get a one-year property-tax holiday. Two-year vacancy? Two-year holiday. That benefit could go directly to the business or, if necessary, its landlord. Even in the latter case, square-footage owners (from individuals up to Silverstein Properties) would enjoy a powerful incentive to rehabilitate empty spaces and fill them with tenants, rather than watch them stay vacant while NYC slowly dies.

Gotham needs tax incentives to fill these dormant properties with entrepreneurs, employers, employees, clients, customers, patrons, audiences, diners, drinkers, and partiers. Such commerce would create jobs, generate tax revenue, and wake up the city that doesn’t sleep.

If Sliwa wins, he could implement his own tax-cutting agenda and embrace some or all of these ideas.

However, if Mamdani prevails, God forbid, please enjoy these concepts now. During his tenure, they will not see the light of day.

For now, these proposals could help Sliwa beat Mamdani. In a two-man race, Sliwa — not Cuomo — would enjoy the enviable position.

An October 22-23 Victory Insights survey of 500 likely voters found Cuomo trailing Sliwa, head-to-head against Mamdani. Mamdani would beat Cuomo 49 percent to 39 percent — a 10-point race. Mamdani vs. Sliwa would run 49 percent to 41 percent — an 8-point gap, and a better showing by the Republican crime fighter than the crooked, independent Democrat granny killer.

A Mamdani win could prompt more than a quarter of New Yorkers to evacuate. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 291: From Empire State to Empty State: Zohran Mamdani’s New York)

“A whopping 26 percent of voters are considering moving out of the city if Mamdani is elected. This includes 49 percent of Cuomo voters and 69 percent of Sliwa voters,” according to Ben Galbraith, senior pollster for Victory Insights. “Vast swaths of the electorate not only want Mamdani to lose; they see Mamdani as an existential threat to the city, to the point where they are considering leaving NYC entirely if he is elected Mayor.”

If this happens, Mamdani could launch a Two Million Man March out of Gotham.

Galbraith adds, “39 percent of voters believe Mamdani is a threat to the future of the city. Cuomo and Sliwa voters are widely considering fleeing the city if he’s elected. New York City seems to be nearing an inflection point, one that could reshape the city for years to come.”

READ MORE from Deroy Murdock:

The USA Can Dominate AI and Make STEM Great Again

Zohran Has Two Daddies

Repentance First, Forgiveness Second

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.

By mfnnews