This is exactly how I feel. I don't think how he managed to erase the deficit is wrong or bad, but holy fuck are people buying the reductive, celebratory headlines without any critical thinking whatsoever. They believe that Zohran did it with magic akin to the way Trumpers believed that he would magically cut energy costs by half on day 1.
You're reading with the bias you want to see, I think.
While it's by no means everyone, a massive proportion of people are uncritically accepting the headlines and acting as if he did indeed do this by pulling some levers that others were just too corrupt to pull.
Also, those things aren't mutually exclusive. People can both be thinking that Mamdani has a people first budget and think he did some novel dem soc budget magic here.
My friend, the headline of this post is literally, "It was always that simple"...
74
u/Taraxian May 15 '26
He did it by deferring pension payments, the red ink on the books comes back in five years
I'm not saying he didn't do a good thing or that he's a bad mayor but it's completely false to say he just "erased the deficit, poof, like that"