NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani says Iran war is worsening a cost of living crisis

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday condemned the U.S. war with Iran, saying it has inflated costs in New York City that were already high.

“While this war has exacerbated a cost of living crisis, that is a crisis that existed from even before the time I was running for mayor, and it’s reflected in the fact that we are the most expensive city in the United States of America,” the mayor told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in an interview clip released Thursday.

The ongoing military operation against Iran should “not just be opposed on political grounds, on moral grounds, but even just on economic grounds,” Mamdani said, pointing to the billions of dollars already spent on the war that he said could be spent on “working-class Americans across this country” instead.

The mayor riffed on a lyric from the late rapper Tupac Shakur’s song “Keep Ya Head Up”, telling “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, “I wish that the words of Tupac from the ’90s weren’t still prescient, but they continue to be true for too many, which is that ‘we always have money for war and not to feed the poor.’”

Washington has already spent an estimated $28 billion on the Iran war, which began as a joint military operation between the U.S. and Israel in late February and has become deeply unpopular among Americans.

In a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted last week, before negotiations between senior U.S. and Iranian leaders in Pakistan collapsed over the weekend, almost 60% of Americans said that the war with Iran is going “very” or “somewhat” badly for the U.S.

And the war, which led Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz sending global oil prices soaring, has led to rising costs of gas across the U.S.

On Thursday, mostly along party lines, lawmakers in the House failed to pass a measure that would have required the president to remove U.S. military forces from “hostilities” in Iran.

Meanwhile, in Washington earlier this month, President Donald Trump dismissed calls for his administration to expand day care subsidies for families with young children, saying the government has to pay for the military instead.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said to attendees at a private Easter luncheon at the White House. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

Mamdani, who was elected in November after running a campaign focused on making New York City more affordable, just passed the 100-day mark in office.

Making child care free for New York families has been a key priority for his administration.

In March, Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a free child care program that would serve up to 2,000 2-year-olds in New York City, with hopes to expand it in the future.

On the election trail, the mayor vowed to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for his campaign pledges, including making child care more affordable. Earlier this week, he and Hochul formally proposed a “pied-a-terre” tax on homeowners who own properties worth more than $5 million in New York City but don’t primarily reside there.

“This tax will raise at least $500 million directly for the city. It’ll help fund things like free child care, cleaner streets, safer neighborhoods,” Mamdani said in a social media video posted Wednesday.

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