‘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

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.
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