F*ck Your Sensitivity - The Mad Ramblings of a Gen X-er

Free Buses, Rent Control = Higher Taxes! HEY NYC DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHRAN!

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New York’s ballot may be “minor” on the calendar, but the ideas on it are anything but. We dive straight into the clash between headline promises and hard arithmetic: free buses and subways pitched as safety and access, a new 2% levy on high earners to pay for it, and a sweeping push for stricter rent control alongside massive “affordable” housing builds. It all sounds generous until you trace where the money comes from and how behavior changes when the bill lands on a small slice of taxpayers.

We pull apart the numbers behind fare-free transit, the city’s existing deficit, and the proposed tax mechanics that go beyond simply nudging incomes. Then we test the rent control narrative against decades of evidence from economists like Thomas Sowell and Henry Hazlitt: cap prices while costs climb and you get deferred maintenance, vacant units in regulated buildings, and a dwindling supply for the very people you want to help. Promises to abolish private property raise the stakes further, because property rights are the engine of financing, upgrades, and new construction. Remove those signals, and you don’t get equity; you get scarcity.

To highlight the pattern, we shift to healthcare and follow how ACA premiums rose while subsidies grew to mask the pain, funneling public dollars toward private insurers and leaving the unsubsidized middle squeezed. Across transit, housing, and health, the through line is clear: compassion without math collapses under its own weight, while targeted, tested policies that expand supply and protect the vulnerable can actually stick. If you care about safe streets, reliable transit, livable homes, and budgets that balance, this conversation cuts through the spin and goes straight to tradeoffs.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves New York, and leave a review with the one policy you’d fund first and why. Your take might shape our next deep dive.

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SPEAKER_01:

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational fun. Everyone in this room is now dumb for a point.

SPEAKER_05:

You don't know what I'm doing with the fun. I told you what I'm doing after one. If I don't want to win another one's five, no, I'm gonna find out at this point.

SPEAKER_00:

Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

SPEAKER_04:

You want to do a time. You want to go the truth.

SPEAKER_03:

We wanna talk about the man race in New York. We want to talk about the governor race in New Jersey. Because there's certain things we want to talk about with Jackie Cheryl and the Zolhan. I'm never gonna call him by his right name. He's always gonna be the Zolhan to me. And yes, I know it's apropos that the Zolhan from Don't Mess with the Zolhan was a Jewish IDF agent. And we're using that to describe the Zolhan of New York. Oh, we're gonna cut usually they call it Super Tuesday. This this is I'm gonna call this uh Minor Tuesday because there's this is an off, it's an off-year, off-election year, so there's really nothing else going on besides these races, but you have this this socialist who is whose family is wealthy, extremely wealthy, who happens to be Muslim, of course, running for the mayor of New York against against uh we're not even gonna get it into the Republican opposition because honestly, if he went against Cuomo without without Curtis Sleewood, this wouldn't even be a discussion. But since we're dividing the votes between the two Republicans and the idiocy of that, we're not even gonna get into that. But New York, who had a very, I mean, if you look at New York in the 70s, you look at the movies from the early 70s and 80s that how they depicted New York, it was this tumultuous place, it was this unsafe place, and in reality, that's what it was. And we're kind of heading down that same path because we we are probably not we, but the New Yorkers are probably going to elect the first truly socialist mayor that has such radical plans and ideas for this city to make it a communism utopia. I mean, that's what this is. Let's just be honest. This guy wants to abolish land property ownership. That's his thought process. We're gonna get into Thomas Sowell, we're gonna get into a whole bunch of other things. But it's just if you listen to this guy's rhetoric, if you listen to what he wants to do, the first thing I love about him, though, is we're gonna the fact that he wants all busing and public transportation to be free. His thought process was that if you make all this free, then that's also going to create safety for the bus drivers. Because no, there's gonna have to be no worry about fare jumpers. We make all we're gonna make all buses and public transportation in the city of New York free to everyone. Free. And that's what I love, and because that's that's the liberal mantra when they want to win an election. Everything's gonna be free, but in the end, the taxpayers pay for it. And we're gonna get into that as well. So he's gonna make all the buses and everything free. Transportation's gonna be free in New York. That's gonna be great. What can possibly go wrong with that? Seriously. Oh, there's just one little catch, there's one little caveat. For him to do this, it's gonna cost anywhere between 600 and 900 million dollars a year that the city's gonna have to shut out. Now, the city's already running out of deficit, a budget deficit by like a billion dollars. So it's uh he's gonna attack on another billion dollars to implement this program. So, you you know, the the thought process with liberal, I mean, especially with liberals and socialists, is you know, what we're gonna do is we're gonna attach, we're gonna attack the rich. We're gonna, oh, those damn richy riches, we're gonna go after them, we're gonna go after them like bane, went off to the rich and gotham. We're gonna go after them, we're gonna tax them more. We're gonna sit there and slap another 2% tax onto the tax they're currently paying now. They're they're currently paying 50% of their income to the state, or should say, to the city of New York. We're gonna slap on an additional 2% tax because honestly, what would go wrong if you slapped on just 2% on these dead, these these fucking millionaires? Let's listen to the Zulhan.

SPEAKER_06:

A lot of individuals in this city pay more than 50% of their income in taxes. When you talk about a fair share, how much more than what is the fair share? What's the number?

SPEAKER_02:

I've said that we should increase personal income taxes by 52% is is fair.

SPEAKER_06:

And my and my point is that more than half of your income.

SPEAKER_02:

That's if you're making a million dollars in New York City, or more than that, million, you can afford to pay 2% more. And the reasons you can afford to do so is because that money will be used to better your it's gonna bet.

SPEAKER_03:

Listen, you millionaires who take your you take your cabs and your cars and your lemos and your helicopters. You cannot ride the bus for free. Oh, you fucking morons. But there's a caveat. No, no, no, no, no. There's a caveat to all this because with the Zolhan, there always is. It's not going to be an added 2% on your already taxed money in reference to your personal income tax. No, no, no, for the city. It's not, it's not gonna you we're not gonna take that that tax and just add on two percent and makes it 52%. No, no, no, no, no. It's an additional two percent tax. I'm gonna say this again. It's an additional two percent tax. So you're going to pay that 50% income tax that you were already paying, and now you're going to incur a 2% penalty. So it's not like you're just gonna add on to the 2%, the 50% add on just 2%. No, because that would only be a couple thousand dollars here and there. No, no, no, no, no. To increase that kitty of money for all the free stuff, because everyone knows a good socialist, you know, it's socialism is great until you're run out of other people's monies. No, no, no. That's almost like a 2% penalty. So you don't just pay additionally onto your tax into your state tax. That 2% is then taxed over everything individually. Think about that for a minute. So now they're gonna be raising anywhere between you know, say you're a million dollars, so you're gonna get an additional two and twenty thirty, you know, twenty thousand dollars. That's not chump change. So you are just going to try to tax yourself into prosperity by using other people's money. Then the Zohan's other big thing is rent control. We're gonna have rent control, everything, you know, prop person, you know, for you having private property, we're abolishing that. We're going to go after those bad landlords and we're going after rent control. I want to play this full two-minute clip because this clip really sums it up. And this is people, this is something that people in New York should listen to. Because here's the thing: rent control and major economists, you know, historic economists, it says rent control does not work because of the fact that when you lock in the prices, the people that own these properties can only, you know, charge so much. But the problem is when the cost of the upkeep for these buildings continues to go up, it's not going up alongside or parallel to the amount of money you can charge. So sooner or later, you're not going to have the ability for the upkeep of these properties because you don't have enough income coming in to make the repairs. It's very simple. There is so many apartments vacant right now in New York that are in rent-controlled buildings because the owners cannot put in tenants without actually losing money. But we gotta we gotta we've gotta listen to this full clip.

SPEAKER_02:

Standing here on West 83rd Street in front of a building owned by one of the worst landlords in New York City. We are talking about a lack of heat, a lack of hot water. Housing isn't just more expensive than ever. It's falling apart.

SPEAKER_03:

It's falling apart. I'm sorry, I shouldn't. It's falling apart because the landlords cannot afford the upkeep because you're not allowed to, you're not allowing them the ability to charge more.

SPEAKER_07:

Thomas Sowell writes that not only is there little new housing built in rent-controlled cities, but the quality of existing housing deteriorates as landlords provide less maintenance and repair under rent control, since the housing shortage makes it unnecessary for them to maintain the appearance of their premises in order to attract tenants. Henry Hazlitt states that if rents are not allowed to increase in a free market, landlords will not trouble to remodel apartments or make other improvements in them. Not only will they have no economic incentive to do so, they may not even have the funds. Some rent control policies are so oppressive that landlords find it profitable to abandon buildings altogether. Sowell writes that in New York City, many buildings have been abandoned after their owners found it impossible to collect enough rent to cover the costs of services that they are required by law to provide, such as heat and hot water.

SPEAKER_02:

And I will also build 200,000 truly affordable homes across the five boroughs over the next ten years to ensure that tenants, whether rent stabilized or market rate, can actually have more housing.

SPEAKER_07:

Henry Hazlitt predicted that the inevitable result of rent control is the government deciding to build so-called affordable housing at the expense of the taxpayers. This doesn't make housing affordable, but simply passes the costs on to those who do not have the luxury of living in rent-controlled housing. Hazlitt writes that the houses are rented at a rate that does not pay back costs of construction and operation. The tenants in the buildings are being subsidized by the rest of the population. The question is, how long will those who are forced to foot the bill for someone else's rent choose to stay in the city and be looted by their public servants?

SPEAKER_03:

It's very simple. They don't. They fucking leave. You have corporations, you have financial institutions that are on Wall Street and have been on Wall Street for years going to Dallas. Why? Because they're getting out of this mayhem, this mess. They see it coming. And then I love it because the Zolhan's like, well, if you do business in New York, even if you're not corporately headquartered here, we're gonna tax you. Good luck with that one, motherfucker. Like I said, socialism is wonderful till you run out of other people's money to spend. And the this this utopia or dystopia, we should call it, that we're running into is only gonna get worse because of the fact that if you sit there and abolish property ownership, what's what else are you gonna take away? Here he is, here he is saying it.

SPEAKER_02:

My platform is that every single person should have house.

SPEAKER_03:

And I think basically now, like I said, this guy's father is a is a professor at Columbia University, his his mother, I forget his I forget what his mother does, but and you know, the and they're they're rich, their family's rich, and you know, when you can go out to a private island and basically have a walled-off wedding with your millionaire friends, yes, that make that makes you the ultimate socialist.

SPEAKER_02:

With these two options, the system the system has hundreds of thousands of people unhoused, right? For for what?

SPEAKER_03:

And if I got an idea, if there was any system I got an idea. Why don't you let him stay at your place?

SPEAKER_02:

Whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now. Um and I think that people try and play like gotcha games about these kinds of things, and it's like, look, I care more about whether something It's not a gotcha game.

SPEAKER_03:

You literally just said you were going to abolish property ownership.

SPEAKER_00:

When you lose Bill Maher. Yes, you can move too far left. And when you do, you wind up pushing the people in the middle to the right. At its worst, Canada is what American voters think happens when there's no one putting a check on extreme wokeness. They say in politics, liberals are the gas pedal and conservatives are the brakes. And I'm generally with the gas pedal, but not if we're driving off a cliff. Sweden opened its borders to over a million and a half immigrants since 2010, and now 20% of its citizens are foreign-born, and its education system is tanking, and it has Europe's highest rate of gangland killings. To which liberals say blaming immigrants for the rising crime rate is racist. Yeah, but is it true? Of course it's true. It's not a coincidence the quality of life went down after the Somali gangs started a drug turf war using hand grenades. Calling it racist doesn't solve the problem.

SPEAKER_03:

This is what New York is running into. I love New York. I love the city. I lived in the city for years. I still I haven't I don't go back as often because it's it's just gone downhill over the last 20 years. But I've loved New York City. And to see this happening, and you know it's gonna happen now, and there's there's no and to and to Bill Maher's point, there's no common sense to hit the brakes. New York is going off the cliff. And you have to sit there and wonder, and you have to hope that this experiment fails rapidly enough that it becomes a keystone moment for the 2028 presidential election. Because you know they're gonna run some moron that's gonna have this socialistic opportunities in their brain, and there's a segment of the population which is so disenfranchised about everything, it doesn't matter what it is, they're just disenchanted about everything. But these are the same people with their$400 handbags and their$2,000 phones preaching to other people. Well, I feel oppressed. The only oppression is no one smacked you up the side of the head as a child and said, get fucking over it, be over yourself. Not everything is a mental illness, and become a better person. Become an educated person. Stop worrying. And I love it. And the the the ethic of hard work is no longer there coming up with this Gen Zs and Gen XYQs, whatever the fuck it is. People like myself, I lived in a car at 18. I worked my way through college working two full-time jobs and a part-time job. I didn't want to take on the burden of student loans, so I worked. And I went to school at nights, I went to school during days. I went to school when it was conducive to work around my full-time schedules. I didn't ask for a handout. I didn't ask to be given something that I didn't deserve. But that's the way this society is now. Now, if you don't give a handout to people, you're racist. Now, if you own property, you know, you're you're you're fascist. You're Hitler. And New York is real, New York is literally about to run off the rails, and I'm worried that, and I'm not actually worried, because if someone like AOC or Bernie Sanders runs in 2028, I I I have this feeling that America will write the ship again and figure it out, especially after four years of Biden. I I I I I think about socialized medicine sometimes, and I think about Obamacare, and I think about the Obamacare premiums. You know, when the bill passed, you know, you can keep your doctor, you, you can, you can do all this stuff. And it was interesting that that if you take a look at the costs of of Obamacare, and you look at the the soaring costs, you go back to 2013, the average health insurance plan was$2,300. Not a month, but just it was$2,300. And then if you take a look at where we are, that's$2,300. That that was in 2013. The first year of Obamacare, the premiums jumped up 68%. Remember, you can keep your own doctors. Don't forget, you can go to all the specialists you want, pre-existing conditions, and everything else. So a yearly premium was uh$2,500 in 13. In 14, it jumped up to over$4,300. 68% increase. It stayed pretty consistent through$15, through$16, it went up to$4,500. And then in$17,000 you're looking at six grand, and then at$18, it jumped up to eight, and it stayed consistent to where it is now. It's almost$10,000, these subsidies. Think about that, just think about that for a minute. It jumped from$2,500 to$10,000 a year for these people. So what they did is, I'm excuse not the subsidies, but I'm saying the the premium increases. So what the what we did is the government then decided, of course, well, we're going to help people, of course, and this was all part of Obamacare. We're going to help them, we're going to offer these subsidies. So after that, you know, after the last COVID bill, which never should have been passed, they added more subsidies into these premiums. So all these people, these 42 million people, or whatever the number is, that are on Obamacare are now being subsidized, the majority of their premiums by the United States government. Where the where's that money coming from? Of course, the money is literally coming from the United States taxpayer. So these premiums are of course are supposed to expire at the end of 2025. Now, the problem is that Democrats don't like to point out is they're the ones that picked the expiration dates for these premiums. Previously, before the big beautiful bill, Republicans actually voted to keep these premiums. Not Republicans, I mean, excuse me, Republicans voted to keep these premiums. Democrats said, no, no, no, no. They need to expire. They extended them once, but these premiums need to expire, especially the ones that were put into the last COVID bill. This was never supposed to be a permanent solution. But the problem is when you took away the open marketplace, you took away competition, you took away the ability for people to go out and get private insurance because we had this small segment of the population that didn't want to be on Medicare and Medicaid, that we had to offer a marketplace for them to have these premiums and get this insurance, which is sometimes better than employer insurance, and you pay less. I always go to the example that in uh 2012, we had to get privatized insurance. And we as a family of three paid, I think we we we paid like$198 a month in premiums. And this was the silver plan. I can't if this was the silver plan. I can't remember who I think it was, it was United Healthcare. It was a silver plan. So we paid$193 a month on this premium. And then after being on the premium for a little bit of time, it dropped down to like$125 a month. And this was was for this is with three people on the plan. I did I we've talked about this before. I did the math. I went back now in 2025 and looked at what that same plan would cost me today. That same plan will cost me almost$2,800 a month. Now, of course, they're hoping that we get these subsidies. So the majority of it is paid by the taxpayers. But here's the thing: the Democrats are just funneling money into these privatized companies, these healthcare companies, you know, because of the fact that they're part of their donors. They're part of what keeps them running, they're part of what keeps them in yachts, they're part of what all of a sudden they make$155,000 a year, but four years later they're worth millions and millions of dollars. There is a reason why, because of these kickbacks. So what is basically in my mind, all the Democrats are trying to do is subsidize this and give that money to the insurance companies to keep their constituents happy. And then the middle class has to sit there, open up wide, and take a bite into a big shit sandwich. We're gonna get into more of that a little bit on I'll probably say on Thursday, but again, as always, don't forget the truth. And I'm out of here,