Some of the rich are happy to pay taxes, but as it turns out, the return on investment often just isn’t worth it. Especially when those taxes fail to fund quality public education for the community’s children, human services for the community’s homeless, and ample law enforcement to protect everyone’s personal safety and private property.
After years of increasingly onerous tax burdens and half a year ordered by the government to stay in cramped apartments, New York City’s wealthy have fled town en masse, some for the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley, but others from New York state as a whole. Now, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in a poor position, literally and figuratively, as he fails to figure out how to salvage the mathematical disaster plaguing the economic engine of the nation.
“I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!'” the Democrat said on Tuesday. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”
Well, well, well. As it turns out, the media’s favorite grandma endangerer has finally encountered a problem with New York’s tax math that he can’t just blame on President Trump, as he did last year after the Republican SALT deduction cap forced New Yorkers to pay for the federal and local taxes they voted into effect.
Living in a dense city means you can save by trading a car for decent walking shoes and a subway pass, a backyard for beautiful parks, and big dining rooms for a bevy of restaurants all made more inexpensive with ample competition. This arrangement has a massively positive return on investment when the city provides basic, taxpayer-funded social services such as quality public schools and law enforcement and isn’t mandating the closure of the private sector. But when Mayor Bill de Blasio terrifies the cops to the point of total petrification, and city dwellers can’t escape their studios with picnics in the park or dinners out on the town, the bargain looks a little Faustian.
Robberies in Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side have nearly tripled from this point last year, and in the West Village, robberies have increased by 50%. Why the hell would the much-reviled 1%, who pay half of the state’s tax revenue, return when not only can the city not protect its own property, but it also can’t even effectively use the tax revenue it demands to protect the less fortunate and small-business owners or teach New York children?
And so to Westport they go, leaving behind a bloated budget and an egomaniac governor with no more means to foot the bill.
