‘I’m over the moon’: New York’s small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape: Initiatives including cutting permits just to serve ice-cream amount to a sweeping program of deregulation (Christopher Mathias, 25 Jul 2026, The Guardian)
Red Scare? The democratic socialist mayor of New York City spent this week talking about red tape.On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America – posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “RED TAPE” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti.
“New York’s small business owners have said it over and over: endless paperwork and the uncertainty of dealing with City government has made getting their stores up and running too difficult,” Mamdani wrote on X, announcing a package of 50 policy changes aimed at easing the financial burden of fines, fees and regulations on mom-and-pop shops across the five boroughs.
Economics trumps ideology.