Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist running for mayor of New York, cannot seem to answer the tough questions raised by his preposterous agenda. Like, where will the money come from? Like most Democrats, his twitch response is to promise higher taxes on the wealthy, but that strategy fails if you run the high-earners and profitable businesses out of town.
That’s happening in France right now, where money – lots of it – is going to Luxembourg and Milan — and it has already been happening here in New York. Gravity isn’t episodic; it always works. So it is with higher taxes chasing wealthy people out of town…always.
In New York City we’ve lost over 300,000 people since 2020, many of them in top income brackets. The city’s population peaked at about 8.8 million in early 2020; despite a slight gain last year (mainly foreign-born newcomers) we’re still at only about 8.48 million.
More important, the Citizen’s Budget Committee reports that over 125,000 New Yorkers fled for Florida during the five years ending in 2022 — and took nearly $14 billion worth of income with them, costing New York billions in lost taxes.
Businesses, too, have fled, taking with them jobs and wealth. Wall Street, in particular, has seen a steady outflow of companies moving to Florida and Texas. Between 2019 and 2023 Bloomberg reports that almost 160 Wall Street firms moved their headquarters out of New York, taking with them nearly $1 trillion in assets under management. The out-migration is not all due to Bill de Blasio’s horrific stint as mayor; it’s also that during Covid people realized they could conduct most of their business remotely.
They didn’t need to be in NYC.
People were astonished when JP Morgan said they have more bankers in Texas than New York. Why? If you pound businesses with enough high taxes, they’ll eventually move to greener pastures. If Jamie Dimon hadn’t invested $3+ billion in a midtown Monument to Jamie, my guess they’d have even fewer bankers left in New York.
New York City and New York State depend on Wall Street; other industries have long pared back their presence in the Big Apple. As the NY Post reported, “128 Fortune 500 firms had their headquarters in New York in 1965; today it’s down to about 50 — Texas beats us with 54, and even Florida has 22.” Not a great look, and it could get worse.
By the way, the phenomenon of higher taxes pushing out people and capital isn’t confined to the U.S. Every time a hard-up Socialist-lite country in Europe finds itself needing cash, they hike taxes and discover – Zut Alors! – people are calling in the moving vans. The FT had a piece recently chronicling the current exodus of money from France, where political instability and the threat of higher taxes on the wealthy have driven investment funds to Luxembourg and Milan. People, too, are leaving, though the FT did not have numbers.
Zohran, who is conning gullible New York voters with promises of freebies he cannot keep, imagines “the wealthy” to be a faceless mass of humanity he can tap at will. He doesn’t seem to realize that the wealthiest New Yorkers have choices and they will likely choose wisely; that’s how they became wealthy, after all.
