In the heart of New York City, the unthinkable is becoming reality: a socialist insurgency is no longer on the fringes. It’s winning.
The mayoral primary victory of Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, is not merely a local event or an eccentric district quirk. It’s a warning siren for the entire nation. What happens in New York doesn’t stay in New York — especially when it’s a city that sets the cultural, financial, and political tone for the rest of the country.
The battle for America’s soul is being fought in city council meetings, in primary elections, and on the streets of New York. We cannot afford to sit it out.
Mamdami’s radical agenda, cloaked in the soft language of “equity” and “community care,” is not about helping people. It’s about centralizing power under the government, redistributing wealth through force, and turning the most powerful city in the world into a test case for a socialist America.
If the financial capital of the free world falls to Marxist ideology, the rest of the country is not far behind.
New York is a beachhead for a nationwide socialist revolution. It’s not just Mamdani — it’s a growing wave of elected ideologues, funded and organized, who want to gut capitalism and replace it with a top-down government-run system.
Their policies aren’t theoretical any more. They’re being implemented.
In Mamdani’s vision of New York, landlords are villains, property rights are negotiable, and the needs of illegal immigrants come before those of taxpaying citizens. Public safety is an afterthought. Drug use is decriminalized. Homelessness is institutionalized.
Infrastructure, transportation, policing, housing — all placed in the grip of government planners pushing equity over efficiency, ideology over functionality. The result is predictable: urban decay, mass exodus, rising crime, and collapsing infrastructure — a recipe we’ve seen in every city that’s flirted with socialist rule.
But this isn’t just about New York’s self-destruction. It’s about national contagion.
New York City is America’s media hub, its cultural center, and, most critically, the beating heart of its financial system. If socialist policies like Mamdani’s take hold here, they will radiate outward. A city that once stood as a monument to capitalism will serve as a propaganda engine for the exact opposite.
And make no mistake — the rest of the nation is watching. If socialism becomes normalized in the Big Apple, other progressive cities will feel emboldened to follow.
The ripple effect is already in motion. Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle — all experimenting with shades of the same ideology. The difference is that New York City is the crown jewel. Its fall would mark a point of no return. A city once revered for its grit, ingenuity, and entrepreneurial spirit would become the flagship of American decline.
The financial implications are staggering. New York isn’t just any city — it’s the global capital of finance. Wall Street, Nasdaq, the headquarters of major banks and corporations — all reside here. Investors around the world look to the city as a symbol of economic stability.
What happens when socialist policies threaten property rights, undermine police protection, and destroy incentives to do business here? Money will flee. Businesses will relocate. Markets will react. The economic engine of the United States will stall, and the consequences will reverberate worldwide.
RELATED: Stop calling Zohran Mamdani a communist — he’s something worse
Worse yet, the ideological shift will bleed into federal politics. As New York City’s congressional delegation grows more radical, so does the national platform of the Democratic Party. Policies birthed in Mamdani’s district — like rent cancellation, taxpayer-funded drug programs, sanctuary city mandates, and public housing on suburban streets — have already crept into the national discourse. What starts as a local experiment quickly becomes a legislative push in Washington.
This is why the stakes are so high. Conservatives must recognize that the fight is not limited to red states or Capitol Hill. It’s in Queens. It’s in Brooklyn. It’s in the very places where socialism is gaining power block by block, district by district. The battle for America’s soul is being fought in city council meetings, in primary elections, and on the streets of New York. We cannot afford to sit it out.
We must expose this radicalism for what it is. We must challenge the deceptive branding of “democratic socialism” as some harmless cousin of communism. We must fight back with truth, passion, and deliberate action. New York can no longer be written off as a lost cause. It must be reclaimed — because the country depends on it.
A socialist New York is not just a local problem. It’s a national emergency.
If Mamdani and his allies succeed in transforming the financial capital of the world into a socialist enclave, the damage will not be confined to the five boroughs. It will creep into every corner of America — one policy, one election, one city at a time.
We don’t need to imagine the consequences. We’ve seen them — in the crumbling economies of Venezuela and Cuba, in the failed experiments of Detroit and San Francisco. But if we allow the socialist left to take New York City, the fall of those places will pale in comparison.
The future of America could be written on the streets of New York. Let’s make sure it’s not written in communist red.
Every time I hear a Fox News host or a Republican pundit call New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani a “communist” or “democratic socialist,” I wince in annoyance. Sometimes, I even yell at the TV — not that they can hear me, and even if they could, they’d probably ignore me.
In reality, however, Mamdani is not a would-be Lenin. He is, in fact, a practitioner of woke capitalism. He’s not about to nationalize the means of production or seize the assets of the wealthy progressives in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Manhattan’s Upper East Side — the very people bankrolling his campaign and voting for him.
The more we cling to outdated Cold War categories, the less attention we give to fighting the woke maniacs dismantling our constitutional order.
What Mamdani will do, most likely, is strip police protection from working-class neighborhoods, pour taxpayer money into gimmicks like city-owned grocery stores, and glorify Hamas terrorists.
Soviet-style central planning isn’t on his agenda for the Big Apple. Cultural revolution is.
Those calling Mamdani a “communist” are playing to Boomer-era Republican fixations. They’re appealing to people who still see politics through Cold War lenses — the bad guys are “commies,” and anyone unwilling to bury socialism is the enemy.
It’s an easy way to rally the troops: Invoke Ronald Reagan’s fight against “the evil empire,” and pretend that Mao and Brezhnev still represent the ultimate threat. For some Republicans, “democratic socialist” is simply a euphemism for “communist,” and that means we’re back in the glory days of battling the Soviets. It simply isn’t so.
I’ve been called a “right-wing Marxist” by people who should know better. But when communism was the threat, I was as anti-communist as anyone alive. I even admired Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to expose Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government and military — to a point. But that’s not the danger in front of us now.
The greatest danger today comes from woke maniacs embedded in media, education, and government — people dismantling our constitutional order in the name of “equity” and “inclusion.” The more we cling to outdated Cold War categories, the less attention we give to fighting them.
What’s more dangerous: Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky economic ideas, or his militant abortion politics, his zeal for performing gender-transition surgeries on minors, his rejection of biological sex, and his anti-white rhetoric? The “communist” label is the least of our concerns.
Mamdani is a woke zealot, and nearly half of New York’s voters embrace his politics. His biggest fans are young, college-educated progressives who love both his identity-based crusades and his promises of government giveaways.
Some Republican commentators may be too nostalgic for Boomer anti-communism — or too wary of alienating their own socially liberal supporters — to confront Mamdani’s cultural extremism head-on. It’s easier to rehash 1970s and ’80s rhetoric than to grapple with the ideological fight that’s actually in front of us.
RELATED: Stop pretending the Democrats are imploding
The Manhattan Institute reports that Mamdani’s proposed budget includes $65 million for “gender-affirming care,” including surgery for minors, and the creation of a special City Hall office dedicated to LGBTQIA+ advocacy. In Minneapolis, the Democratic frontrunner — another African Muslim, though hardly devout — plans to turn the city into the nation’s hub for sex-change procedures and a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.
Yes, Mamdani wants to “promote the global intifada” and squander tax dollars on absurd programs. But his war on public safety and his hostility to traditional norms should alarm us most. None of this has anything to do with Marxism.
Communist regimes, in fact, were more conservative than Mamdani on social policy and public order. Eastern European communist parties today oppose same-sex marriage and most of the LGBTQ agenda. Mamdani’s program is far more culturally radical than anything dreamed up in the Kremlin.
It may take time for Republicans stuck in Cold War mode to grasp this. But if we keep fighting yesterday’s ideological battles, we’ll keep losing today’s cultural war.
I take a weekly walk in Sleepy Hollow, New York, through its historic cemetery, where many captains of industry rest. William Rockefeller lies in a grand mausoleum. So do Walter Chrysler, Leona Helmsley, and Elizabeth Arden. Andrew Carnegie’s grave is marked only by a simple Celtic cross.
Washington Irving is buried there, too, in a sprawling family plot on a hill just behind the Old Dutch Church he made famous in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
In the present, our responsibility is to live with honor, blessing and serving those we know and influence today.
But among the monuments to those who built billion-dollar corporations or wrote legendary tales, you’ll also find the graves of “ordinary folks” — men and women of humble means and obscure backgrounds. Walking among these modest headstones, you begin to see the nobility in even a simple life well lived.
One headstone I saw recently brought that home — and made me think about the left’s ongoing push for “reparations.”
On the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I came across the grave of a man who died in 1912. That August morning in 1945, an estimated 70,000 people perished when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city — a calculated gamble to end World War II quickly.
In the years before the bombing, Japanese Americans — U.S. citizens — were herded into internment camps. Many likely had close relatives and friends who died in Hiroshima that day. In 1988, the federal government agreed to pay monetary reparations to surviving internees.
The Conversation, a website that claims to blend “academic rigor” with “journalistic flair,” offers a comparison between reparations for Japanese Americans and those sought for African Americans. One logistical distinction, the site notes, is that the injustice against the Japanese occurred over a defined period — from 1942, when internment began, to 1945, when the war ended.
The tombstone that started the gears turning in my head along that cemetery walk had an interesting dedication carved into it. A man named John C.L. Hamilton shared the gravesite with his wife, who died a few years after he did, but for his part, the inscription read:
JOHN C.L. HAMILTON
1842–1912
Soldier and Patriot
He Served His Country with Valor
and Distinction During the
Tragic Years of Our Civil War
Many other Civil War veterans reside in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and, standing prominently among them, is a fitting monument:
PATRIA CARIOR QUAM VITA.
[Country Dearer Than Life]
OUR
UNION SOLDIERS.
While Freedom's name
is understood,
They shall delight the
wise and good;
They dared to set their
country free,
And gave her laws
equality.
Another notable person who has found her final resting place in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is Amanda Foster, who passed away at the age of 97. She used her freedom helping others through the Underground Railroad:
(By the way, if you would like to watch a short but fun 2-1/2-minute “video tour” of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I made one about eight years ago.)
Many men and women — black and white — pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to rid the young nation of slavery. If the United States ever pursued true reparations based on an honest review of historical records, the line of claimants who lost family and treasure — black and white — would stretch long.
Punishment for those who engaged in the slave trade or owned slaves ended long ago. The best way to close that dark chapter is not to blame or “correct” the past, but to leave those people and events where they belong — in history.
In the present, our responsibility is to live with honor, blessing and serving those we know and influence today.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.
“Don’t eat your seed corn.” Every farmer gets it. Every American with common sense gets it. The only people who don’t? The people who run corporate America.
A farmer keeps part of this year’s crop for planting next year. He could sell it now and pocket more cash — but then there’s nothing to plant, nothing to harvest, nothing to live on later. That’s obvious to anyone who works the land.
Capitalism creates wealth. But when wealth is extracted at the expense of the product, the people, and the future — that’s not capitalism. That’s predatory ransacking.
But in today’s boardrooms, the rule is reversed. Short-term profit is all that matters. Strip the future bare, cash out, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.
The rewards for this corporate vandalism are massive: fat bonuses, stock windfalls, golden parachutes. The damage — lost jobs, gutted industries, shoddy products — is someone else’s problem.
And the fastest way to pull it off? Slash costs to the bone. Ship jobs overseas. Push out the people who know the business best. Wreck customer service. Kill innovation. Downgrade quality until the product barely passes as the same thing you used to make.
Private equity and corporate strategists have a new trick for squeezing customers dry: “revenue mining.” That means cross-selling, upselling, jacking up prices, and hiding the real costs in creative contracts.
At first, it works. Existing customers tend to stick around — inertia keeps them from bolting right away. But each gimmick drives off a slice of loyal business. Combine that with lower service quality and cheaper products, and the exodus accelerates. Before long, the company is stuck with an overpriced product, lousy service, and no easy way to attract new customers.
I’ve watched this play out in my own life. My exterminator. My alarm company. My HVAC service. All wrecked by the same formula. The local phone number? Redirected to a call center overseas — if I can navigate the phone tree. The people I used to know? Gone. The contract? Suddenly much more expensive.
The service I get for my trouble? Less than before. And when the tech finally arrives, all he says is, “Things are much different now.” They might wring one more payment out of me, but I’m already shopping for a local outfit that treats me like a customer instead of prey.
In short, they ate their seed corn. They got one fat harvest out of me, then pushed me straight into the arms of their competition — for good.
At least my dentist is still a one-man shop who owns his own business. But even dentistry is under siege. Private equity-backed dental chains are giving dentistry a bad name, pushing unnecessary procedures just to meet revenue targets.
A USA Today investigation titled “Dentists under pressure to drill ‘healthy teeth’ for profit” uncovered one such example:
Dental Express was part of North American Dental Group, a chain backed by private-equity investors. At least a year earlier, the company had told dentists like Griesmer to meet aggressive revenue targets or risk being kicked out of the chain. Those targets ratcheted up pressure to find problems that might not even exist.
In my professional career, I have seen too many examples of the same pattern: private equity buying and destroying great businesses that had loyal customer bases. To be fair, I have also seen examples of private equity groups buying a business, embracing its product, and continuing to provide good service. I wish it weren’t the exception, though.
More often, private equity groups treat the acquisition as a mine: extract the capital through dividends and existing customers while accruing significant debt. In fact, the funds used to purchase the business are often borrowed and never even repaid.
Dig until empty, leave a crater, and move on.
An X user put it perfectly:
Some private equity is genuinely investing in the business to grow a solid business. This is good, full stop.
Some private equity buys up dying businesses, breaks them up, sells off the valuable bits and sometimes lets the worthless bits go through bankruptcy, taking advantage of bankruptcy laws to profit. This is good, actually, as it recycles the resources of dying businesses into good businesses.
The third type of private equity buys good businesses that are doing OK or even doing well. Then they sell off all the assets, load the company up on as much debt as they can, pay themselves giant dividends, and then take advantage of the same bankruptcy laws to discharge all the debt so they never have to pay it back. This is really bad.
This isn’t just happening to small companies. It’s hitting America’s industrial backbone.
I’ve written before about how Carlos Tavares, the former CEO of Stellantis (corporate parent of Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep), awarded himself a $39 million compensation package for making short-term decisions that briefly maximized profit before revenue and sales collapsed, leaving dealers with overpriced, outdated inventory. He made off with the profits, then left behind a hollow pipeline for the dealers truly committed to Stellantis.
RELATED: Private equity’s losing streak is coming for your 401(k)
I also covered Boeing’s disastrous $43 billion stock buyback binge. The short-term boost to its share price came at the expense of critical investment in its products — and has cost the aerospace giant $35 billion since 2019. To plug the hole, Boeing had to raise another $15 billion in capital and push back the already overdue launch of the 777, citing “negligent engineering.”
That phrase used to be unthinkable in the aerospace industry. Boeing made it possible by gutting its engineering and technical staff to feed Wall Street.
The consequences keep coming. This month, United Airlines grounded much of its fleet after a failure in its proprietary “Unimatic” flight system. The airline claims it doesn’t know what caused the failure.
But I have a strong suspicion.
In recent years, United has aggressively outsourced its technical operations to contractors using foreign labor — often H-1B visa workers — at lower cost. One subcontractor, Vista Applied Solutions Group, boasts that it helps clients “increase productivity” while achieving “considerable cost savings.”
That’s great — until the system fails and planes can’t fly. United may have saved on salaries. The short-term reduction in salary expense has eaten United’s seed corn, leaving the company with a technology system that can’t keep its planes in the air.
It is imperative for those of us who defend capitalism to also repudiate those engaged in practices that give it a bad name. Capitalism creates wealth. But when wealth is extracted at the expense of the product, the people, and the future — that’s not capitalism. That’s predatory ransacking.
And it deserves our scorn.
In 2013, I published an article at American Thinker titled “How Detroit Almost Killed My Business.” It drew attention — enough to earn me a spot on Fox News Radio. The theme was simple: Government actions drive up costs until businesses can’t survive. I had to leave Detroit in 1984, along with hundreds of other business owners facing the same pressure.
The title of that article could just as easily have been: “How Could These Government Officials Be So Stupid?”
None of it makes sense — until you realize it isn’t stupidity. It’s sabotage.
Detroit finally declared bankruptcy in 2013. But looking back now, I realize my premise was wrong. The politicians weren’t stupid. They knew exactly what they were doing.
That same year, Diana West released her remarkable book “American Betrayal.” In a book that is part thriller, part tragedy, West exposed the depth of communist infiltration in the U.S. government — a war between those hiding the truth and those trying to expose it. Her research, though controversial, convinced me that America had long been the target of a coordinated effort to destroy it from within.
If America fell, the rest of the free world would follow.
With that lens, I reconsidered Detroit. The people running the city weren’t incompetent. They were executing a plan — to destroy the greatest industrial marketplace the world had ever seen. And they succeeded.
So when I now ask, “How could they be that stupid?” I catch myself.
How could anyone in 2020 vote for a man clearly not in his right mind? How could Americans allow COVID to justify the most extreme restrictions on freedom in modern history?
Masks, social distancing, lockdowns, mandatory shots — all of it was wrong. We know that now. And yet it was pushed with religious fervor.
How could they be that stupid?
How could the government open the borders and let in waves of illegal immigrants — including violent criminals from foreign prisons? Why did we pay to fly migrants in from distant countries, give them EBT cards with monthly refills, and house them in luxury hotels?
How could they cripple energy production, restrict how much water we use to wash dishes, and mandate what kind of car we can drive? What free government tells manufacturers what to build, regardless of market demand?
How could they decide diversity quotas matter more than competence? Why target the military for destruction?
None of it makes sense — until you realize it isn’t stupidity. It’s sabotage.
And now we have Zohran Mamdani, a self-described Democratic Socialist, poised to become the next mayor of New York City. His platform includes rent control, government housing, social policing, city-owned grocery stores, and free public transit. Every one of these policies has failed before.
RELATED: Vance on Mamdani: ‘Who the hell does he think that he is?’
Under socialism, living standards always fall. It’s never been otherwise.
How could Mamdani be that stupid?
From my vantage point as an exile from Detroit, I know exactly what’s coming. I watched a government plan hollow out a once-thriving city. Now New York, the world’s financial capital, is in the crosshairs.
Businesses are already preparing to leave. Can you blame them?
Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” Twelve years ago, I warned what would happen to America’s industrial heartland. Now the ruling class has trained its sights on its financial one.
The question isn’t whether people like Mamdani are sincere. The question is: How can we be that stupid?
Vice President JD Vance outlined the Trump administration's plan for the nation's "great industrial comeback" Tuesday at the American Dynamism Summit hosted by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In his speech, Vance identified precisely what must change in order to unbridle U.S. innovation without further dispossessing and deracinating American workers.
Vance, who spent years as a venture capitalist after distinguishing himself overseas in the Marines, acknowledged at the outset that the Trump administration's endeavor to lead the world in artificial intelligence and other potentially disruptive technologies has prompted concerns about the potential for tension between the "techno optimists and the populist right of President Trump's coalition."
"While this is a well-intentioned concern, I think it's based on a faulty premise," said Vance, identifying as a proponent of both tribes. "The reality is that in any dynamic society, technology is going to advance, of course. And speaking as a Catholic, I think back to Pope John Paul II's opening lines of the encyclical Laborem Exercens: 'Through work, man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives.'"
The vice president underscored that, to the late pope's point, technology should not be inimical to labor; instead, it "should be something that enhances rather than supplants the value of labor" — something that improves productivity, increases wages, and "dignifies our workers."
The problem, suggested Vance, is that American firms grew addicted to the drug of cheap labor over the past four decades.
'Even if you replaced the financial element of their jobs — you would destroy something that was dignified and purposeful about work itself.'
This addiction, coupled with innovation's geographical divorce from manufacturing — a consequence of globalization and liberal economic thinking — has prompted some Trump-supporting populists to doubt the promised good of innovation. After all, populists witnessed the de-industrialization of America, an exodus of jobs, the gutting of the middle class, and an unprecedented stratification of wealth.
While foreign nations that Western elites figured for indefinite sources of cheap labor climbed the "value chain" and effectively ate America's lunch, populists watched as American workers at home were further alienated "from their jobs, from their communities, from their sense of solidarity," and from a sense of purpose, said Vance.
Vance intimated that compounding populists' skepticism is the cavalier attitude taken by some technologists and the leadership class' apparent belief that "welfare can replace a job and an application on a phone can replace a sense of purpose."
The vice president recalled a meeting in his venture capitalist days where he told a number of American tech leaders that "even if you had enough economic dynamism to provide the wealth to ensure [middle class families] could afford to buy a house and afford their food and so forth — that even if you replaced the financial element of their jobs — you would destroy something that was dignified and purposeful about work itself."
'We don't want people seeking cheap labor. We want them investing and building right here in the United States of America.'
Vance said that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar tech company suggested in response that Americans' loss of purpose would be remedied by "fully immersive gaming."
While concerns about the potential incompatibility between techno-optimism and rightist populism may be historically justified, Vance indicated that the current administration's "America First" policies can protect citizen labor and thereby reconcile the two camps.
"I'd ask my friends, both on the tech-optimist side and on the populist side not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation," said Vance. "Indeed, I'd say that globalization's hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it's been bad for innovation. Both our working people — our populists — and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy, and the solution, I believe, is American innovation, because in the long run, it's technology that increases the value of labor."
Vance further indicated that the Trump administration is going to help innovators wean off cheap foreign labor and begin on-shoring industry, in part by incentivizing manufacturing and investment inside the United States with tax cuts and other policy instruments; by reducing regulations and the cost of energy; by erecting tariff walls around critical industries; and also by enforcing immigration law and securing the border to drain the pool of cheap illegal alien labor.
"You're making interesting new things here in America? Great. Then we're going to cut your taxes. We're going to slash regulations. We're going to reduce the cost of energy so that you can build, build, build," said the vice president. "Our goal is to incentivize investment in our own borders, in our own businesses, our own workers, and our own innovation. We don't want people seeking cheap labor. We want them investing and building right here in the United States of America."
The vice president distilled the fundamental premise of President Donald Trump's economic policy down to undoing "40 years of failed economic policy in this country," which he characterized as an addiction to cheap labor, both overseas and illegally imported into the country; the over-regulation of industry; the over-taxation of innovators; and the setting of caltrops before individuals seeking to build in the United States.
Vance indicated that by undoing these ruinous trends and wedding techno-futurism to rightist populism, America is destined for an industrial renaissance.
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If policymakers want strong results, history and economic reality identify small businesses as the catalyst for growth. As a new Republican Congress and the incoming Trump administration view their menu of options, it’s imperative they view things from an appetizer and main-course perspective. The main course is bonus depreciation and access to capital, and the appetizers are reducing regulatory burdens, taming government overreach, lowering energy costs, and finding skilled and qualified workers.
The new Trump administration and the GOP-led Congress must serve up the appetizers and main course to fuel new record growth. Here’s what that meal might look like.
The increase in onerous regulations imposed by local, state, and federal governments is generating louder, justified complaints from small businesses. By April 2024, the cost of federal regulations had ballooned to $1.47 trillion. These rising costs are stifling small businesses. According to the October 2024 jobs report and downward revisions in new job creation, employment is weakening across the U.S. economy.
Industries are feeling the regulatory squeeze, and small businesses are suffering — especially in the wooden pallet industry. Ninety percent of all goods in the United States come into contact with a wooden pallet at some point. Regulatory burdens on the forest-products industry, such as reduced availability or higher costs of environmental permits, directly lower the supply of wood and increase its cost. And because wood pallets are manufactured, businesses in this sector must navigate OSHA oversight, air-quality permits, and trucking-related regulations. Customer-related rules, such as the Food Safety Modernization Act, also pass additional costs to pallet manufacturers.
If President Trump and congressional Republicans implement a comprehensive strategy, they could ignite a surge in economic growth the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Easing regulations would help small businesses lower their costs, enabling many to reinvest those savings in new plants, equipment, and workers.
The Trump administration should aggressively reduce the costly regulatory burdens on small businesses through executive actions. These actions should include initiatives to lower energy costs, which would further reduce expenses for small businesses. For manufacturing companies, lower costs would allow them to redeploy capital toward modernizing plants and fostering innovation.
Businesses, particularly small businesses, are struggling to attract new workers. Increased investment in career and technical education at the federal and state levels is essential. Such investment will help create future pipelines of skilled, motivated, and qualified workers.
The tooling and machining industry, which includes thousands of small to medium-sized precision machining manufacturers, serves a wide range of sectors, including aerospace, ordnance, defense, medical, space, electronics and semiconductors, oil and gas, automotive, and more. The lack of a skilled and qualified workforce remains the top challenge and limitation for precision machining.
The pathway to long-term economic and jobs growth is permanent write-offs for capital expenditures that include both plants and equipment.
To jump-start growth, a 100% bonus provision for plants and equipment for the first year followed by a consistent allowance for plants and equipment in the following years is essential. A heightened level of capital investment gets factories moving, makes small businesses more competitive, and drives higher employment levels and long-term growth.
In a “2 Way Community” conversation with Mark Halperin, Scott Bessent, founder and chief investment officer of Key Square Group and Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Treasury Department, indicated that “100% expensing for equipment is on the table as part of the extension of the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Job.” He also expressed support for “a limited life for structures that can also be expensed by 100%.”
Small businesses in the landscaping and fertilizer industries, for example, would be in a better position to invest in newer technologies and expand their production and distribution capacities.
Small businesses also have increasing capital requirements associated with the drive to automation, the high costs of machinery, and the need for research and development. To remain competitive, small businesses must also have an R&D tax credit available to them. Small businesses operating in the crane, rigging, and heavy transport sector will be able to invest in new cranes and other equipment and have the capacity to grow their businesses.
Every small business must have access to capital. New legislative and regulatory efforts must increase access to capital through streamlined small-business lending. Because 38% of small businesses that fail do so due to lack of capital, there must also be a renewed commitment to community banks, which are essential for small businesses to access capital. Bessent has also expressed support for this idea.
Making the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent and adding these additional incentives will change the game and launch a new wave of economic growth. Several key provisions are already expiring or will be phased out at the end of 2025. Expensing for business investments, research and experimentation deductibility, pass-through deductions, and a reduction of the estate tax concludes on December 31, 2025. These are important and should be continued.
Small businesses have historically driven economic recovery and prosperity. If President Trump and congressional Republicans implement a comprehensive strategy, they could ignite a surge in small-business activity and economic growth the likes of which we’ve never seen.
And if Americans don’t wake up, Mamdani’s brand of radical leftism could well be the future of this exceptional republic.
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