Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been touting accomplishments from his first six months in office, including a significant increase in pothole repairs, a historic low in shootings and homicides, and progress toward universal childcare. Dan Proft cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from six months of results, particularly given that more ambitious elements of the mayor’s agenda, including a proposed city-owned grocery store network, have yet to launch. Proft also played comments from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticizing the placement of data centers in rural and economically disadvantaged communities, including remarks describing health concerns near facilities she visited in Georgia and Memphis, which Proft characterized as lacking scientific substantiation.
Proft welcomed economist Stephen Moore, author of The Trump Economic Miracle and co-author of The Plan to Unleash Prosperity, for his regular weekly conversation. Moore, who recently visited one of the country’s largest data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia, pushed back on characterizations of the facilities as harmful to surrounding communities, arguing that opposition to data centers is functionally equivalent to opposing the internet, cell phones, and GPS technology that depend on them. He argued that communities should retain the right to reject data center development locally, but suggested many rural areas actively seek the high-paying construction and technology jobs such projects bring, drawing a comparison to historical resistance toward early twentieth-century automobile manufacturing plants.
Moore also criticized what he described as inconsistency among figures like Ocasio-Cortez and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who he said support extensive solar farm development across large swaths of rural land while opposing data center construction in similar areas.
Turning to economic data, Moore highlighted new figures from his Unleash Prosperity newsletter showing the national median household income has reached $87,000, a figure he said exceeded Proft’s own estimate during the conversation. Moore acknowledged that gasoline prices have recently climbed above four dollars per gallon amid the ongoing Iran conflict, but argued that average inflation-adjusted gas prices under both Trump administrations have remained lower than under the Biden and Obama administrations, crediting expanded domestic oil and gas production.
Moore also discussed newly circulated analysis from political analyst Nate Silver identifying highly educated individuals with household incomes below $60,000 as a significant and disproportionately white component of the Democratic Party’s voter base, a group Moore suggested aligns closely with support for democratic socialist candidates like Mamdani. He connected this to a broader Wall Street Journal analysis on generational wealth dynamics, noting that the average age of first-time homebuyers has reached 40, an all-time high, while empty-nest baby boomers continue to occupy larger homes at disproportionate rates compared to millennial families with children. Moore argued that an intergenerational wealth transfer, currently concentrated among baby boomers, has largely not yet occurred, contributing to economic frustration among younger generations that he said figures like Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez have sought to politically exploit. Moore suggested indexing capital gains taxes for inflation could encourage older homeowners to downsize and free up housing stock for younger buyers, describing his own reluctance to sell a larger home due to capital gains exposure as illustrative of the broader problem.