Timothy P. Carney is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner, where this story was first published.

When Zohran Mamdani, the New York Democratic mayoral nominee, defends his idea of socialist grocery stores, he says he can pay for them by cutting city subsidies to “corporate grocery stores.”

This claim is based on a basic misunderstanding of the city’s current grocery subsidies. The money he plans to use to pay for his proposed city-owned grocery stores is money the city doesn’t have.

Specifically, he mistakenly believes that the city is spending $140 million to subsidize private grocery stores, and he thinks he can take half of that money and use it to build government grocery stores.

“We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price-gouging,” Mamdani said in one scripted video.

In another interview, he went into a bit more detail, saying he had already detailed “how we are going to pay . . . for the entire agenda.”

According to Mamdani, his five grocery stores would cost $60 million.

“That should be compared to the city’s existing program called City FRESH, where they are set to spend $140 million, subsidizing corporate grocery stores. . . . So we would take less than half of the money the city is already set to spend, and actually deliver results,” he said.