CNN host, Fareed Zakaria, blasted Democratic-run cities for embracing a principle long familiar to conservatives: the more government tries to solve a problem, the more it can fuel waste, fraud, abuse, and dysfunction. He argued that government “solutions” often leave problems worse than before while draining taxpayers, all while the government expands faster than the society it is meant to serve.
🚨 HOLY CRAP. CNN was just FORCED into calling out the NGO fraud operation in California: "Los Angeles...homelessness budget was $950M! Yet homelessness surged 80%!"
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) February 22, 2026
"Blue cities are out of control! Promise more, spending more, delivering less."
BRUTAL!pic.twitter.com/d6jKERv4xR
"New York is really a prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less, and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day," Zakaria said.
He went on to note that while Los Angeles now has nearly a $1 billion homelessness budget, the crisis continues to worsen, and billions of dollars in spending cannot be clearly traced or tied to measurable results.
Take Los Angeles, another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city's homelessness budget for fiscal year 2025-26 totals about $950 million. The L.A. Homelessness Services Authority reported that in 2023, homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city. And a 2024 AP account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015 and 80 percent in the city.
All this amid public frustration despite billions spent. An audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved.
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"Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater, where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point," he added.
"What is the theory of good government here?" Zakaria asked. "If the answer is keep adding programs, the city will keep producing unaffordability. Because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs."
He then turned his attention to New York City.
In Mamdani’s case, Zakaria argued, the issue may have been diagnosed correctly, but the proposed solution is bound to fail. The New York City mayor helped shift national attention to affordability, particularly housing costs, but instead of pursuing deregulation, zoning reform, or policies aimed at increasing take-home pay, he has called for greater government involvement.
As Zakaria noted, the deeper the government intervenes, the more the problem tends to worsen.
"Zohran Mamdani's basic instinct is correct. Focus on affordability, especially housing. But not by providing government subsidies," he said. "These only seem to have driven up the cost of rent as subsidies naturally do. The city's rental assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal year 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recently reported fiscal year. That is a five times increase in a handful of years, and housing costs only got worse."
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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