Remember a couple of minutes ago when Democrats were running campaigns on making life more “affordable” for Americans? Well, that was all a lie, in case you were wondering, and they continue to prove that.
Democrats ran the entire 2026 cycle on one word. Affordability. Groceries, rent, utilities, the cost of being alive. It worked. They won the House, the Senate, Texas, and a mayoralty in New York built on the promise that a socialist would finally make the city livable for working people.
A week later in the Big Apple, here’s the first real test of that promise, and New Yorkers can see exactly what it costs.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is backing the wildly misnamed Delivery Protection Act, which would outlaw the subcontracting model Amazon uses in New York City. Amazon currently works with more than 40 local delivery service partners employing roughly 5,000 drivers at about $24 an hour. The bill would also require last-mile storage facilities to get licenses from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection carrying new safety, training, and employment mandates.
Now the numbers.
Amazon’s analysis puts the cost to the average New York household at an additional $664 per year in delivery costs. Not $66. Six hundred sixty-four dollars, every year, out of households that voted for a man who promised them he’d bring prices down.
AMNY reports more than 10,000 jobs could be at risk. The same analysis found the licensing requirements could push last-mile facilities outside city limits entirely — raising costs further and generating as many as 132 million additional late deliveries a year.
Same-day delivery, as a practical matter, goes away.
Think about who actually uses it. Not the brownstone crowd in Park Slope with a car and a Saturday afternoon free. It’s the woman working two jobs who orders diapers at 11 p.m. because there’s no other hour available to her. It’s the elderly man in Washington Heights who can’t carry groceries up four flights. It’s the family that doesn’t own a vehicle in a city where owning one is a luxury. The convenience being legislated away is a lifeline for people without time or mobility, and the $664 lands hardest on the households with the least cushion.
Mamdani’s pitch is that companies like Amazon build business models around denying workers their rights and make the streets less safe. And he says such nonsensical things with a straight face.
But look at what the bill actually does. It doesn’t set a wage floor. It doesn’t mandate training standards and leave the structure alone. It bans the structure, which is the one thing the Teamsters need, because they could never organize Amazon’s drivers one contractor at a time. Outlaw subcontracting and 5,000 drivers land in a single bargaining unit. That is the bill. The safety language is the wrapping paper.
And New York has run this job-killing scam before. In 2019, the same ideological faction, led by DSA founding member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, chased Amazon’s HQ2 out of Long Island City — roughly 25,000 to 40,000 jobs and billions in tax revenue, gone, in a city now staring at an $8 billion deficit. The lesson? These left-wing losers hate ‘the big corporations’ more than they like providing opportunities for their constituents. What part of this is hard to understand?
Here’s the part that matters beyond the five boroughs. Every Democrat in New York (and elsewhere) who campaigned on affordability this fall now gets measured against this. Mamdani ran on it in 2024. He and they told voters the cost of living was the emergency. Their first move in power was a policy that adds hundreds of dollars a year to a household’s annual bill, kills 10,000 jobs, and takes same-day delivery away from the people who need it most.
Democrats are socialists and socialists are economy-killers. I don’t know how many more examples there has to be in order to convince more Americans of these facts.
