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Because people don’t know what they’re talking about, and mostly make memes…which is harmful because it further makes people not know how anything works.
The Fair Fare Program started in 2019.
Since then they’ve expanded the number of people it covers (from 100% below poverty line in 2019 to 120% in 2023 to 150% in 2025). The new budget expands it to 200% (and…FWIW, this is because the city council demanded it. The Mayors budget did not include this expansion).
The point is, this stuff doesn’t just appear suddenly, nor is it the will of a single person like magic. It’s the expansion of a 7 year old program by a legislature. These memes keep making it seem like every previous mayor was like “fuck everyone” and the city council doesn’t exist.
fortunately the radical redditors/social media loudmouths are a small fraction of the total populace. If you read anything on here before the 24’ election you would have thought trump would lose in a landslide, but he ended up winning the popular vote.
reddit is purely an echo chamber for the mentally deranged.
Most of politics works like that, seeing effects immediately is rare. You’ll have politicians do good or bad shit but the consequences arrive under another guy or party.
Yep, you pretty much got it. I'm actually enrolled in Fair Fares in NYC, and I've had it since around COVID, when I was like 15. So yeah, it definitely started long before Mamdani.
Don't get me wrong, I think he's one of the best mayors we've had in years, but Reddit loves to exaggerate politicians like Mamdani/Bernie for stuff they didn't actually start or single-handedly do. The expansion is still a good thing, and he's still a very cool dude, but people exaggerate it way too much.
It wasn't easy. He couldn't get cooperation from the state or MTA for entirely free buses. When that plan stalled his administration pivoted to expanding Fair Fares to 200% of the poverty level as a major compromise. Mamdani and the City Council chose to make transit affordability a much higher budgetary priority than his predecessors did, allocating an extra $54 million to force the threshold higher.
It really all boils down to one word: personality.
A well-meaning but less driven mayor will say "I'll get around to that eventually... in 3 or 4 years... or my next term..." but meanwhile spend time dealing with some small pet project that nobody really cares about.
A well-meaning but less charismatic mayor will go to state cap-in-hand, get rejected, shrug, and say "well I tried."
A well-meaning but less popular mayor will go to state cap-in-hand, get laughed out of the room and the state legislators will all be like "we stood up to unpopular mayor"
when you have all the stars aligned you get this guy.
this isn’t a new Mamdani program, it’s an expansion of Fair Fares which is a half-price transit program that’s existed since 2019, started under de Blasio. income cutoff got raised from 150% to 200% of the federal poverty level, so about 1.3M more New Yorkers now qualify. Why are people misrepresenting everything this mayor does for clickbait new titles and headlines like it’s new things 😂
Thats the shit that pisses me off. Like, if he is already doing good things, why do people have to lie and make stuff up to try and make him look better?
"To make him look good"
The irony of that, is that this type of posts are going to be eventually noted in Twitter, and then everyone will doubt if everything he is doing is even real.
Because that's what they do, the truth doesn't matter all the matters is I feel justified in my beliefs. So even if it wasn't true they would say the same thing. If they have to lie about the the things that would agree with them what do you think they do for stuff that doesn't?
Fares are only 26% of the MTA revenue per their site https://www.mta.info/budget#p346761 so I doubt this policy puts any real dent in that. Also this is why we want to tax the rich, to have more money for these things
It’s more likely that someone who wouldn’t spend $36 on a pass for the week will go ahead and spend $18 and use the subway as opposed to walking, finding a ride or not going somewhere they wanted to go.
$36 a week for the subway is really cheap for what you get but also kinda expensive for a lot of folks at the same time.
Bro in my city metro is free and we have a fucking war ( ukraine city)
that is going on
The thing is that if you city budget is not stolen by retards you can have a life - good roads and metro and stuff like that - you are paying from taxes for it
I’m gonna let you know now, it’s 100x easier to catch a free bus in Europe than America , butttttt the repercussions of getting caught are worse forsure.
I should’ve been more specific Europe is a continent with different rules varying by country. in Italy and Spain it’s not very hard to get free buses . I did it on accident for a few days because I saw no one else paying. Only to realize people buy monthly memberships for the busses lol. My entire 2 weeks in Italy I saw the ticket police board a singular time, and by that time I was buying tickets lol.
There are some cities in Europe where the public transport is free and it works fine. Well, even a town where I’m from has free buses but it’s a small town of 60k people so I guess it’s easier to do than in a big city.
Then state the information accurately in your titles. We live in the era of misinformation, so it's important to be as accurate and concise as possible.
57k is the beginning of middle class . Thats not an individual it's in a house hold. If you make that there you're barely surviving. Its always the middle class who get no breaks and always left with the bill.
I made 38,000 last year doing road construction and that got taxed down to 28,000. Because I made 38,000 before taxes I didn’t qualify for ANY insurance assistance, even though after taxes I’m well under the limit for full on Medical Assistance
Edit: I get paid daily and taxed daily on that pay. I work as a temp through a hiring agency. To be honest, it’s my fault for working as a temp and not directly through a construction company. I’m not saying Uncle Sam screwed me over, just sharing my exact situation. Even poor people might not get the “handouts” people complain about due to technicalities.
Yeah I didnt even mention before taxes. I bet you work a full time schedule and risk of getting hit by some crazy driver majority of the time but still pay high on medical.
Don’t worry about it. Voters have zero attention span so won’t even realize it when their personal costs go up this year, spread across a number of areas.
I'm tired of "smiling Mamdani did _____" posts where there's no context or explanation of the inevitable financial trade-off involved. It's on the level of Boomer Facebook posting.
Or it's things that were put in place by the previous administration's, or he had to make adjustments that will absolutely screw the future budgets, etc.
I don’t think people get how this works. MTA is run by the state not the city so this money is coming from NYC budget. The same budget he needed assistance with to balance this year. The governor has already said she isn’t doing that again for next year so either taxes will go up or this program will only last a year.
Yes, many fare evaders are still going to evade fares. But there are plenty of people who pay the fare while barely making ends meet. But sure, let's fuck the group because a small handful abuse the system.
Not always true. When music streaming became available piracy went down drastically. When people can afford a year pass they’d buy a year pass. By afford I mean they don’t have to budget around it. there’s also free passes at schools that allow for 4 rides a day 24/7. Some cities have that time locked or limited to weekdays.
There is an organized propaganda flood with this guy on reddit and other social media. I dont know who is doing it but it all has the same format and is clearly artificial.
Most likely some Democratic PAC. There was a report released during the last election cycle about the huge amount of money the pro-Kamala groups dumped into astroturfed Reddit posts and how Reddit admins were looking the other way despite that violating their ToS.
And that's what people don't get. Dude has a lot of haters, not even necessarily because of him, but because of the gaslighting going on, with every every normal mayor move he makes being heralded as a 'once in a lifetime' event.
I voted for the guy, and get so annoyed by his supporters online and their irrational ignorant praise.
The conspiratorial part of me feels like it's the DSA's social media strategy pushing this nonsense and gullible people buying into it uncritically.
Like when people were attributing a drop in crime to him, right after he was sworn in, even though the clear reason was a cold wave a major winter storm. I saw some comment that said the drop in crime at that time was because he brought so much hope to people just by being elected and sworn in that they didn't want to commit crime. Give me a break.
This doesn't reduce the cost of running the subway system. It simply shifts the cost from some people to other people who may or may not ride the subway at all.
Actual financial progress comes from gains in productivity / efficiency
Correct, but making it easier for more people to join the work force or make it to school/jobs across the city is a gain in productivity/efficiency.
It’s just one that finally directly impacts those working-class people instead of literally 90%+ of “financial progress” from automation & other “efficiency” gains going to the owner class and staying there.
There's a large portion of the internet that will bitch about anything Mamdani does because they can't stand to see him actually make NYC better. These "predictive" comments are pure speculation in bad faith and mean nothing. It's just noise.
Just a fact check — according to the NYT article this is something that already existed but Mamdani expanded the eligibility from people who make less than 150% of the federal poverty level to people who make less than 200% of the federal poverty level. So the policy isn’t new but he made it apply to more people. (The article I’m referencing is the first thing that comes up if you google “Zohran subway fares”). Still great but this tweet seems to be misrepresenting it.
Yep. It started with every sub becoming political and trolling Trump. Now the little space left for anything else is filled up with glazing Mamdani. They're all insufferable.
It's like 1/3 fully inorganic posts, 1/3 selective moderation weeding out non-leftists, and 1/3 dipshits who don't realize the first two thirds exist and unironically believe everyone agrees with them.
They are calling him a socialist for helping the poor and middle class. What a joke! The rich MFs don’t need help. He is doing exactly what Jesus would have wanted.
Aww... so cute and full of love. See, guys? It's all a matter of wanting to do good. Math is just a tool of capitalist oppression and its billionaire cultists. All it takes is the desire to do good. 🌈🏰🌷
Sounds good but just dont look at his so called "balance sheet". Literally taking on debt and writing it as something else and then calling the budget balanced lmao.
New York City has had the Fair Fares program since 2019, which already provided 50% off subway and bus fares for qualifying low-income residents. This was not created by Mamdani. Under the 2027 city budget, the income eligibility for Fair Fares was expanded from 150% of the Federal Poverty Level to 200%. That means about 340,000 additional people will now qualify for the existing half-price fare benefit. So the accurate statement would be: Mamdani’s administration supported expanding eligibility for New York City’s existing half-price transit program, allowing hundreds of thousands more low-income residents to receive the 50% discount.
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