When Zohran Mamdani, the New York Democratic mayoral nominee, defends his idea of socialist grocery stores, he says he can pay for them by cutting city subsidies to “corporate grocery stores.”

This claim is based on a basic misunderstanding of the city’s current grocery subsidies. The money he plans to use to pay for his city-owned grocery stores is money the city doesn’t have.

Specifically, he wrongly believes that the city is spending $140 million to subsidize private grocery stores, and he thinks he can take half of that money and use it to build government groceries.

“We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price-gouging,” Mamdani said in one scripted video.

In another

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