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jeff monassebian
@JMonassebian
Jeff is the managing attorney of Technology Practice Group, specializing in technology transactions and AI.
New York
Joined April 2021
125 Following
89 Followers
1.3K Posts
@amuse https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@RedWavePress https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@JoshKraushaar https://t.co/fKJ7XuD4Uf
B'H
TWO PEOPLES. ONE BOND.
Forged at the founding, unbroken for two hundred and fifty years. The bond between America and Israel did not start in 1948. It started at Yorktown. From the first breath of the American experiment, the Jewish people were part of it. In spirit. In blood. In treasure.
THE MORAL DEBT
John Adams said it plainly: “The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation… the most glorious nation that ever inhabited the earth.” He saw in the Jews the source of the moral truth that inspired the Founders. That all men are created equal.
THE DEBT MADE REAL
But the debt was not only moral. It was real. When Washington's army was starving and unpaid, the treasury empty, Yorktown ahead, it was Haym Salomon, a Jewish broker from Poland, who raised the money that saved the Revolution. He gave his whole fortune and died penniless, never repaid. Madison called himself “a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon.” No Salomon, no Yorktown. No Yorktown, perhaps no America.
BLOOD ON THE LINE
A generation later, Judah Touro, the son of a rabbi, was struck down carrying ammunition under fire at the Battle of New Orleans. He nearly gave his life so the young nation could stand.
THE CIRCLE CLOSES
Now the circle closes. America once armed a fledgling Israel. Today Israel's genius guards America. The same minds behind Iron Dome built the Trophy shield, a system that shoots incoming missiles out of the air, and it now rides on our Abrams tanks. David's Sling. Arrow. The interceptors our Marines chose. Israeli engineering runs through our arsenal, and Israeli intelligence sharpens our own every single day.
NOT A CHARITY. A SHIELD.
Israel is not a charity. Israel is a shield. She stands on the front line, where the free world meets radicalism first, taking the blow so America does not have to.
WE REMEMBER
And we have seen what that blow costs. On October 7, Hamas murdered, tortured, and dragged the innocent from their homes, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Children. The elderly. Whole families at a music festival meant for joy. We do not look away, and we do not forget. Their memory is a wound and a charge, and it binds these two peoples closer still.
A QUARTER MILLENNIUM
That is the span we mark this Independence Day. A quarter millennium since a handful of farmers and merchants pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, and a Jewish broker named Salomon pledged his alongside them. The lamp they lit still burns. It has outlasted kings and empires, and it will outlast the enemies at the gate today. Across all those years, patriots of every faith have kept the watch, the children of Israel among them, from the first breath of the Republic to this one.
WE GIVE THANKS
So today we do not only look back. We give thanks. For the founders and the financiers. For the soldiers and the shieldmakers. For the covenant that has never broken.
The promise still holds: “I WILL BLESS THOSE WHO BLESS ISRAEL.” Genesis 12:3, Parashat Lech Lecha
Happy 250th, America. Long may your torch burn, and long may it light the way for the free.
Jeff Monassebian
July 2, 2026
@RobGerundo https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@ChrisNoblett https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@michaeldickson https://t.co/fKJ7XuD4Uf
B'H
TWO PEOPLES. ONE BOND.
Forged at the founding, unbroken for two hundred and fifty years. The bond between America and Israel did not start in 1948. It started at Yorktown. From the first breath of the American experiment, the Jewish people were part of it. In spirit. In blood. In treasure.
THE MORAL DEBT
John Adams said it plainly: “The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation… the most glorious nation that ever inhabited the earth.” He saw in the Jews the source of the moral truth that inspired the Founders. That all men are created equal.
THE DEBT MADE REAL
But the debt was not only moral. It was real. When Washington's army was starving and unpaid, the treasury empty, Yorktown ahead, it was Haym Salomon, a Jewish broker from Poland, who raised the money that saved the Revolution. He gave his whole fortune and died penniless, never repaid. Madison called himself “a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon.” No Salomon, no Yorktown. No Yorktown, perhaps no America.
BLOOD ON THE LINE
A generation later, Judah Touro, the son of a rabbi, was struck down carrying ammunition under fire at the Battle of New Orleans. He nearly gave his life so the young nation could stand.
THE CIRCLE CLOSES
Now the circle closes. America once armed a fledgling Israel. Today Israel's genius guards America. The same minds behind Iron Dome built the Trophy shield, a system that shoots incoming missiles out of the air, and it now rides on our Abrams tanks. David's Sling. Arrow. The interceptors our Marines chose. Israeli engineering runs through our arsenal, and Israeli intelligence sharpens our own every single day.
NOT A CHARITY. A SHIELD.
Israel is not a charity. Israel is a shield. She stands on the front line, where the free world meets radicalism first, taking the blow so America does not have to.
WE REMEMBER
And we have seen what that blow costs. On October 7, Hamas murdered, tortured, and dragged the innocent from their homes, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Children. The elderly. Whole families at a music festival meant for joy. We do not look away, and we do not forget. Their memory is a wound and a charge, and it binds these two peoples closer still.
A QUARTER MILLENNIUM
That is the span we mark this Independence Day. A quarter millennium since a handful of farmers and merchants pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, and a Jewish broker named Salomon pledged his alongside them. The lamp they lit still burns. It has outlasted kings and empires, and it will outlast the enemies at the gate today. Across all those years, patriots of every faith have kept the watch, the children of Israel among them, from the first breath of the Republic to this one.
WE GIVE THANKS
So today we do not only look back. We give thanks. For the founders and the financiers. For the soldiers and the shieldmakers. For the covenant that has never broken.
The promise still holds: “I WILL BLESS THOSE WHO BLESS ISRAEL.” Genesis 12:3, Parashat Lech Lecha
Happy 250th, America. Long may your torch burn, and long may it light the way for the free.
Jeff Monassebian
July 2, 2026
@DeAngelisCorey https://t.co/fTf0f6TAdd
Khrushchev boasted the West would be defeated not by armies but from within. Reagan put it better: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on." Every generation has to earn it and hand it down on purpose. We have not.
The campus radicals of the 1960s became the professors and administrators who shaped higher education, and they handed students their politics as settled truth rather than one view among many. Those students became voters and candidates, and that worldview now shows up at the ballot box. In New York, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the 2025 primary and won the mayoralty. Socialist candidates he backed then unseated three sitting members of Congress. This isn't a forecast. It's a verdict, and the classroom cast the first vote.
Who controls that classroom today? The teachers unions, who stopped serving students and started serving an agenda, trading the basics for activism and treating parents as an obstacle rather than the point. Education doesn't belong to a union. It belongs to the families whose children sit in the seats. Control has to go back to them.
The platform is now in writing. DSA's national leadership just adopted "Workers Deserve More!" It calls for abolishing the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. It calls for replacing the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by, and subordinate to, Congress. It calls for abolishing ICE and CBP, ending all deportations, and granting immediate amnesty to every immigrant here illegally. The document is explicit that these are only steps toward "building a new society from the ground up."
That phrase is the whole danger. Separation of powers, private property, a market that answers to consumers instead of committees: these are not incidental features of the American system. They are the 250-year bet that made it the most prosperous, most powerful force for good the world has produced. This platform proposes cashing that bet in, trading individual liberty for the discretion of the state.
We don't have to guess how that trade performs. Europe ran a milder version for fifty years, achieved through elections, not revolution, and the receipts are in. EU GDP per capita has fallen from roughly three quarters of America's in 2008 to about half today. Of the world's 50 largest tech firms, only 4 are European. That's stagnation, the soft outcome. Every government that has gone further, abolishing courts, concentrating power in a single body, "building a new society from the ground up," has produced not stagnation but collapse.
The classroom cast the first vote. The platform is the second.
Do not sit by in November, save our democracy.
@jasonhaber https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@Megmd514 https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@nypost https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@nypost https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
CAPITALISM BUILT THAT
An Open Letter to Senator Schiff and the Politics of Envy
Senator Schiff,
When SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq and Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, you did not marvel at what American enterprise can still build. You called it the product of a corrupt system, declaring it terribly wrong that an economy makes a trillionaire while Americans go without health care, and implying the fix is to seize that fortune and redirect it to whatever Washington decides people need.
Respectfully, that is a soundbite, and a dishonest one, engineered for a headline and the resentment it stirs. It betrays no understanding of where that trillion dollars came from, who created it, or whom it has already enriched.
Where Did the Trillion Dollars Come From?
So where do you imagine that trillion dollars came from? It did not exist before Elon Musk built it; there was no pile in a vault waiting to be “redirected” until a senator arrived to redistribute it. That fortune was created out of years of risk, by a man who poured everything into reusable rockets and a satellite network that now reaches villages with no roads, when the smart money said he would fail. Without that risk there is nothing to tax, to envy, or to redistribute. You cannot redirect wealth that was never created.
Nor did that wealth stay in one man’s hands. When SpaceX began to trade, the welder who joined in 2015 at $28 an hour woke up a millionaire, not because of a government program but because an entrepreneur took a risk and gave his people a stake in the outcome. Thousands of employees did too: engineers, machinists, welders, even the people who run the cafeteria. Paper became down payments and college funds for people who build rockets for a living. No government program in this country’s history has ever done that for a working person. You looked at the largest creation of working-class wealth in a generation and saw a crime scene.
The conceit in your proposal is breathtaking: you speak of redirecting this fortune as though Washington had a hand in making it, as though some vote in committee built the rockets or wired the satellites. It is the creed President Obama preached to every entrepreneur, “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” and that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and the progressive left have echoed ever since: behind every private success stands a government owed the credit, and with it the proceeds. But real jobs come from entrepreneurs who persuade investors to risk their own capital, not from bureaucrats spending other people’s; “government investment” is a polite name for the handouts that gave us Solyndra. So name the wealth your policies have ever created for a single working family. The answer is none, because government does not create wealth; at best it moves money from one pocket to another, at worst it destroys wealth before it can be made. Ask Queens. When Amazon offered a second headquarters in Long Island City, with as many as forty thousand jobs at six-figure salaries, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies drove the company out and called it a victory. They did not hand a fortune to the many; they killed one before a single worker was hired. That is what your politics delivers: not the trillion dollars Musk created, but the jobs businesses are never allowed to build.
The Democrat Party of JFK
The senator who fails to grasp that capitalism built this country is no heir to the party I once recognized. I grew up when the Democratic party espoused the values of John F. Kennedy, confident enough to cut taxes, champion enterprise, and ask what a citizen might give his nation rather than extract from it. It was still the party of Mario Cuomo’s conviction and Bill Clinton’s centrist reforms, men who spoke for working people without declaring war on the ones who employed them. That tradition has been pushed aside by a progressive left whose program is antithetical to the principles this country was founded on. The Democrats I remember are facing extinction, crowded out by self-described Democratic Socialists, as if the noun could be tamed by the adjective before it. Mayor Mamdani is their standard-bearer, and you increasingly borrow their language. This is no longer a fringe; it is the party’s rising center: the policies Bernie Sanders has preached for forty years and Mamdani rode into City Hall, and in Maine your party has nominated a Sanders-backed Senate candidate, Graham Platner, who runs openly on a tax on wealth itself, levied on the very fortunes this country’s risk-takers built. Closer to home, Mamdani has thrown his weight behind Darializa Avila Chevalier for Congress, a candidate who has called for abolishing the prisons, the police, and the borders, and who once joked about wiping her hands on the American flag. That is not an adjustment to capitalism. It is its repudiation, now under the Democratic banner.
A Generation Taught Not to Think
None of this would take hold if Americans still understood the principles their country was built on. Socialism advances, and capitalism falls under attack, precisely because those principles are no longer taught. When I was a fifth grader at P.S. 135 in Jamaica, Queens, reading the Constitution and the Declaration was required, and so was understanding the wisdom behind their words. My teacher, Mr. Paxton, taught American history without flinching: the founding and its genius, and also slavery, the broken treaties, the moments the country fell short. What he did not do was tell us what to conclude. He taught us to read a document, weigh a source, argue a point, and reach our own judgment. He trusted a room of ten-year-olds to think for themselves. That trust was the whole of the education.
Too much of today’s schooling does the opposite. Students are handed conclusions instead of tools, taught what to feel about the past rather than how to examine it. That is not teaching; it is indoctrination, and it graduates young people who can recite a grievance but cannot take apart an argument, who know what they are against without knowing why. A generation trained to accept rather than question will not see the next Venezuela coming until it is standing in the empty aisle.
And this is the oldest move in the playbook of every movement that ever sought total control. Communism and fascism did not arrive first with armies; they arrived in the classroom and the public square. The opening act was always to burn or rewrite the books, replacing an inconvenient past with a useful myth; the second was to push aside religion and any authority that taught people their worth came from higher than the state. Strip a people of their history and their faith, and you remove the two yardsticks by which they might measure a government and find it wanting. What remains will believe what it is told, and resent what it is told to resent. That is why a failed history lesson is not a minor classroom problem. It is the cleared ground on which the politics of envy is built.
Socialism Always Ends the Same Way
Make no mistake what this thinking is. It is socialism, and socialism has a record. It is not a theory waiting to be tested; it has been tried on every continent and fails every time, taking the poor down with it. That is not opinion. It is history.
Venezuela is the clearest example. Within living memory it was among the richest nations in South America, floating on the largest oil reserves on earth, a country immigrants moved toward. Then its government promised exactly what your party proposes: to seize the wealth of the few and hand it to the many. It nationalized industry, fixed prices, and printed money to pay for the promises. The result was not shared prosperity but empty shelves, a worthless currency, and millions fleeing on foot. A nation that once fed its neighbors collapsed into the third world in a single generation. That was not bad luck; it is what happens, every time, when government decides it can run an economy better than the people who built it. The trouble is that this history, taught honestly, is vanishing from our classrooms, and a people never taught how an experiment failed cannot recognize it when it is offered again, dressed up as fairness. And it rarely announces itself as Venezuela. It arrives in smaller, friendlier packages, sold as compassion and convenience, one of them a short subway ride from where I write this.
The Government Grocery Store
You need not travel to Caracas to watch the same logic fail. You can see it in Mayor Mamdani’s plan for government-owned grocery stores. The first, in East Harlem, carries a price tag near $30 million for a single 9,000-square-foot store, more than $3,000 a square foot. A private operator building a comparable Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s spends closer to $800 a square foot, about $7.2 million for the same store. The government version costs nearly four times what the market would charge and is still projected to lose money in perpetuity, at least $300,000 a year, despite paying no rent and no property tax. Only government can spend four dollars to do what the market does for one, lose money on top of it, and call the result progress.
Then ask the question Mamdani will not. Once that taxpayer-funded store opens, paying no rent or taxes and pricing its shelves below cost, how many private shops nearby survive? The corner grocer and the bodega that have paid rent and taxes for thirty years cannot compete with a rival that answers to no balance sheet and never has to turn a profit. Government does not enter the grocery business to add a store; it enters to replace the ones already there. Every owner it drives out is a family pushed off the ladder my father climbed, and a neighborhood made one step more dependent on the government that put it out of work. That is not how you end a food desert. It is how you create one, and it is only the smallest version of a larger question: how we choose to answer a hard economy at all.
The Choice Ahead
None of this means the worries are imaginary. People are right to feel the squeeze; a young couple can do everything right and still feel the ladder pulling away. The anger you speak to is real, and pretending otherwise would be its own dishonesty. The argument is not that nothing is wrong. It is that you have misdiagnosed the illness, and the cure you are selling has killed the patient everywhere it has been tried.
There are only two ways to answer a hard economy. One says the pie is fixed, that one person’s gain is another’s loss, and that government’s task is to take from those who have and parcel it out: a politics of subtraction, written in empty shelves and shuttered shops. The other says the pie can be made larger: that the way out of want is more enterprise, not less; more risk rewarded, not punished; more welders handed a stake, not more bureaucrats handed a budget. That is a politics of addition, and it is the only one that has ever lifted a working family.
I choose addition. That is why I will support Bruce Blakeman for Governor, not because he promises to hand everyone a store, but because he understands who builds them and who keeps the lights on long after the ribbon is cut. The trillion dollars you resent was created. It was not confiscated. A government that remembers the difference has a future; one that forgets it ends up waiting in line for bread it once knew how to bake.
Two Hundred and Fifty Years
I am writing in the days before the Fourth of July, and this is no ordinary year: the United States will soon turn two hundred and fifty. Two and a half centuries ago a small group of men pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a radical proposition: that our rights come not from a king or a congress but from our Creator, and that government exists to secure those rights, not to ration them.
A personal note, Senator. Your party speaks of a “fair shot” and a “rigged” system; let me tell you what a fair shot looked like. My father left all his assets in Iran and landed here in 1960 with nothing and five children to feed, worked two low-wage jobs, and opened a business; when it failed, he built another. He never took a dollar of government assistance, yet he put every one of his children through college, and me through Georgetown Law, on no favors and no grants. That was the fair shot, and everyone here has the same one: study, work hard, and try. It has never meant taking what others have earned and handing it away.
America has never been perfect, and Mr. Paxton taught me never to pretend otherwise. We have fallen short, at times terribly. But weigh the whole ledger and the verdict is not close: no nation has lifted more people out of poverty, broken more chains, cured more disease, fed more of the hungry, or opened its doors to more strangers than this one. The welder who woke up a millionaire, the remote village now reached by a passing satellite: these are not the exceptions to the American story. They are the American story. I thank my parents every day for the risk they took in bringing me here, and I thank the country that made that risk worth taking.
That is the inheritance the politics of envy would squander, and the one the party of Kennedy once guarded and now, in too many hands, resents. So as the fireworks go up this Fourth, the question is larger than who governs New York. It is whether, at two hundred and fifty, we still believe in the country that made these blessings possible, or let ourselves be talked into resenting it. I know my answer. I suspect that, somewhere beneath the talking points, you know it too.
Respectfully,
Jeff Monassebian,
June 21, 2026
@StephenMoore https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@DavidAsmanfox https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@JonathanTurley https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@NassauExec https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
@seanhannity https://t.co/n17xbnZFnz
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
Government does not get to repeal risk. It only gets to relocate it, and someone always pays.
Under Clinton, well-meaning housing policy mandated that banks lend to borrowers with no meaningful capacity to repay. No credit check. No down payment. The stated goal was expanding homeownership. The actual effect was forcing lenders to abandon the underwriting standards that exist to price risk accurately and keep bad loans from spreading through the system.
Banks, holding loans they knew were unsound, did what any rational actor does when forced to carry risk it cannot justify: it packaged that risk and sold it downstream as MBS and CDOs. Risk did not disappear. It spread through the entire global financial system, hidden inside instruments few people understood, until it detonated in 2007 and 2008. A policy built with good intentions and zero regard for long term consequences produced the worst financial crisis in generations.
Now City Hall wants to run the same experiment on New York's rental market: strip out credit checks, the clearest signal landlords have for pricing tenant risk.
This is not compassion. It is central planning dressed up as fairness. A credit check is not a vestige of prejudice, it is a market mechanism allocating risk based on evidence. Remove that signal and you do not create more qualified tenants. You force landlords to underwrite blind, the same position regulators forced on banks thirty years ago.
And landlords have no downstream buyer for that risk. There is no CDO for missed rent. No syndicate absorbs a small landlord's bad debt. When defaults hit, they hit the landlord directly, then the mortgage on the building, then the maintenance budget, then the tenants still paying rent in a building nobody can afford to fix.
The lesson of 2007 and 2008 was not that underwriting standards are optional when the cause is righteous. It was that government overriding market based risk pricing does not eliminate risk. It delays and concentrates it until it becomes unmanageable. NYC is about to relearn that lesson with its housing stock instead of its housing finance.
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