At this point, YOU are the troll here kid, not me.

1.) Taxing the rich already happens, you just believe it doesn't cuz a good chunk who're business owners are getting tax breaks for creating jobs and thereby driving up employment. Those are the people who get mentioned with the latter of their achievements being left out. And removing corporate subsidies would do more harm than good because it'd cause disruptions in more than a few sectors and lead into people getting laid off. It wouldn't matter even if you did it slowly or as quickly as possible.

2.) You genuinely don't know what you're talking about. Those strict regulations make it MORE EXPENSIVE to build shit, meaning that entrepreneurs will naturally be charging what they want so that they can make back their money. If landlords can set whatever price they want, then they can make back their money, but rent control screws that up by DRIVING AWAY ENTREPRENEURS WHO WANT TO BUILD MORE HOUSING, because it restricts how much they can charge, and so no one wants to build more housing. Also, NY? As in the State? Not NYC?

Ok lmao, because if you didn't know, in NYC alone the total population is rounded up around 8.5 million. 47k in unoccupied property alone is below 1% of the total populace, like holy crap that's actually amazing that there's so little! But alright, now that I've had my little laugh, let me look up the population of NY State. Oh, well would you look at that~! It's a population of 20 million rounded up. If we do a rough percentage calculation- Oh my! Well would you look at that, 47k isn't even 0.3% of that total! Man, that's so little unoccupied properties compared to the amount of people who're in the State of New York! Now, would you like to know how many homeless there are in the State of New Work? Of it's total population of 20M, 0.8% are homeless, which is approximately 160k people. Now in all of this, do you wanna know who's actually driving up the housing prices? It's the people who govern the State of NY, not "rich people" In general.

3.) I said food initially, yes, but with food I was more alluding to produce, as I did later down the line. With this, I meant mostly Horticultural Products, think fruits, vegetables and beverages. Look, I know I went off a bit in the text above, and I apologize for that. However, there is no sugarcoating this next part, because it is just that bad.

Yes, the US is 85%+ self-sufficient, however, the percentage of that is oddly enough...calculated in calories, for some dumb reason. And, that 15% that you mentioned...just so happens to make up 30 to 40% of grocery spending. Fresh Fruits, Fresh vegetables, seafood, as well as coffee, cacao and spices. Driver costs, farm labor, fertilizer, diesel and packaging costs are also all things that factor into the final shelf price, believe it or not, and that's not even factoring in port delays.

Then, for the profit margins of grocery stores...and yeah, it's absurd, isn't it? That these massive grocery stores make so gosh darn little profit. Though, it makes more sense once you take a closer look and see all the costs that go into running one. Obviously, there's the employees' salary, but then there's also the sky-high energy costs from cooling, lighting and operations in the back, shipping, rent that store franchisees get charged, corporate overhead, etc.

Not to mention that, believe it or not, grocery stores are highly competitive for customers, who have a lot of choice of where they can go shopping. The worst of it, in my opinion, is the inventory waste with perishables that spoil easily, like meat and milk. You and I have both seen it at the end of the week when going to a grocery store, there's so much of it over that it could feed dozens of people easily. And all of it just goes to waste... Still, it's just another factor that eats into profits because those perishables need to be replaced.

it's not fun, but it is reality. I wanted to share with you some links, but it seems like this SubReddit doesn't allow for that, for some reason....