In his campaign for the mayorship of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has proposed replacing fares for the city’s buses with taxes. The reaction to this proposal has been really bizarre and mostly based on a mistaken understanding of how to think about government revenue.

Annie Lowrey neatly summarizes the conventional wisdom in her recent piece in the Atlantic where she describes the proposal as “impractical” and elaborates that “free buses would deprive the MTA of needed revenue.” Other pundits like Matt Yglesias and various commentators on transit have said the same thing.

But this is just wrong. Mamdani proposes replacing fare revenue (a user fee) with tax revenue. The MTA would have the same revenue just from different sources.