Worth posting again! — Molly
By Tony Pentimalli
There is no divine right to hoard billions while your neighbors can’t afford insulin. And there is nothing radical about saying so.
That simple truth was delivered with rare clarity this week by New York City Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani on national television. Asked on Meet the Press whether billionaires have a "right to exist," Mamdani didn't flinch. He said, "I don’t think that we should have billionaires because frankly it is so much money in a moment of such inequality."
Predictably, the comment ignited familiar pearl-clutching. But what Mamdani articulated isn't a call for gulags or guillotines. It's a plain moral indictment of extreme wealth in a collapsing democracy. Billionaires aren't being asked to disappear as human beings. They're being asked to relinquish the obscene economic power that allows them to bend laws, capture government, and insulate themselves from the consequences of their greed. There is a difference between existence and extraction, and Mamdani dared to draw that line.
This isn't abstract. The top 1% of Americans now hold more wealth than the entire middle class. As working families ration medication, billionaires like Jeff Bezos spend $500 million on yachts with helipads. While teachers take second jobs to survive, Elon Musk buys Twitter on a whim, lays off thousands, and still gets richer. Meanwhile, lobbyists backed by billionaire cash block every serious effort to raise taxes, cap insulin, regulate corporate landlords, or fund public housing. This isn't a flaw of capitalism. It's its final form.
What Mamdani did was refuse to genuflect to the altar of wealth. He didn’t offer the usual "billionaires should pay a little more in taxes" half-measure. He questioned the entire system that makes billionaires possible in the first place. That shouldn't be a controversial stance. In a functioning democracy, we don't crown kings or oligarchs. We create systems that prevent their rise.
And yet, the billionaire worship is so baked into our culture that even asking the question becomes a threat. Mamdani is vilified not for misrepresenting facts or undermining institutions, but for telling the truth: concentrated wealth is incompatible with a just society. Billionaires can exist, but billion-dollar bank accounts should not. It really is that simple.
But Mamdani didn't stop there. In another segment, he delivered what might be the most common-sense proposal New York City has heard in decades: let cops focus on solving crimes and stop asking them to be social workers, therapists, traffic monitors, and mental health responders.
His plan? Create a Department of Community Safety staffed by trained professionals to handle the 200,000+ mental health calls currently flooding the NYPD. Redirect certain duties like homelessness response, hate crimes support, and nonviolent public safety concerns to specialists. Let police officers do what they were ostensibly hired to do: solve major crimes.
This is not a defund-the-police soundbite. It's a reallocation of responsibility. It’s reality-based governance. And it’s sorely needed. NYPD currently has a bigger budget than the militaries of some small nations. Yet in the first quarter of 2025, 65% of reported crimes in New York City went unsolved. That’s not public safety. That’s performative force with diminishing returns.
Mamdani’s proposal offers a way out of the endless cycle of police bloat and community distrust. It draws from models already showing success in cities like Denver, where programs like STAR send mental health professionals, not cops, to nonviolent calls. The results? Fewer arrests, fewer escalations, better outcomes for everyone involved.
Yet even this measured, pragmatic proposal is treated as a threat. Why? Because it shifts power. Because it asks us to imagine a city where safety isn’t synonymous with force. Because it challenges the sprawling empire of overtime, bloated budgets, and political cover that the NYPD has enjoyed for decades.
What Mamdani understands and what more Democrats must learn is that progress doesn't come from placating billionaires or pandering to police unions. It comes from telling the truth and doing the work. We can have justice or we can have billionaires. We can have safe communities or we can keep pretending cops are the solution to every societal failure.
We can't have both. And we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
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*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky
@tonywriteshere.bsky.social
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