The more I think about it the more brilliant I find Mamdani’s pledge. Free buses, free day care, and a rent freeze are an immediate and huge injection of income into poor and working lads families in NYC without a direct cash transfer. It is an example of alleviating poverty by expanding the social wage. It’s the kind of thing democrats should be advocating for everywhere.

From a political perspective, absolutely. This is why I think the Democrats' biggest political problem over the last two decades or so has been climate change. Voters support the Democratic position on climate change ("We should do something,"), but they do not in any way share the Democratic priority on climate change ("It's the most important thing.")

So when the BBB got turned into the IRA and the BIL, and the Democrats were forced to actually prioritize and pick/choose which things got included and which things got cut, the majority of the direct spending and tax provisions that survived were all for green endeavors. Child care, permanent ACA subsidies, universal pre-K...all got dumped so there would be money left for the clean measures. The bill was primarily a climate bill, both on the tax and spending side.

That hurt in two ways. First, as you point out, there are lots of other things that cost money but have an immediate impact - while all the green stuff involved (mostly) capital investments and infrastructure that takes years to actually manifest. And second, most voters want climate change to be "solved" but rank it as vastly less important than almost any other issue - which has not been the position of the Democratic party for quite a while.

Of course, Goofy's point is well taken. These positions are great for campaigning on, but they're a bear to actually implement. For example, there's a reason why even transit advocates are cautious about getting ride of fares, and whether buses can be both "fast and free," as Mandami promised. Making them free guts the budget for the bus program, dramatically induces people to switch from walking and biking to riding the bus (even for very very short trips), and makes the bus a free place to sit and get out of the weather for a while. So the service becomes free, but you run the risk of landing at a "you get what you pay for" degraded level of quality.