We’ve all marveled at the stupidity of Manhattan voters, in voting into power some Marxist asshole who is promising all sorts of free stuff in exchange for higher taxes and malevolent gouging of successful businesses and the individuals who made them or run them.
This might work if Manhattan was truly an island, i.e. well away from any mainland, where the population is in essence imprisoned on the island and can’t move out of the Marxist hellhole. This, by the way, is how Marxist governments have traditionally been able to bend their citizens over the desk: by forbidding them to leave or physically restricting their ability to do so.
Fortunately (for the would-be recipients of the looming Marxist economic rape in the Five Boroughs), they have a chance of saving themselves from catastrophe by simply leaving for sunnier climes (in every sense of the word), taking themselves, their businesses and their tax payments with them.
And the scale of said catastrophe? Here’s the pitiless financial analysis:
Put simply, by any normal accounting, New York State is using federal funds to pay $21 billion to NYC. By the same standard, New York City too is presently bankrupt, in the old-fashioned sense that it cannot pay for its extravagant spending, collecting $86.8 billion in total revenue versus outlays of $119.8 billion. The $31 billion needed annually by New York to survive comes, directly or indirectly, from the federal government. That will not last.
But all this is mere prelude to the Mamdani tax-the-rich onslaught about to hit New York City. The numbers are frightening.
At the individual level, in a city of 8.5 million people and 4 million taxpayers, the top 1%, or some 40,000 individuals, account for an estimated 45% of the city’s total $17.4-billion personal income tax receipts. While the New York Post talks of 1 million potentially exiting New York, it is highly likely that at least half of high-income taxpayers will choose escape over life in Mamdani New York. So goes roughly $4 billion, from a mere 20,000 departing for greener pastures. Others are sure to follow. Seventeen point four billion dollars will be the high-water mark for New York City personal income tax revenue.
It gets markedly worse when businesses choose to exit New York, especially financial firms.
The city collects roughly $13 billion in direct taxes on businesses, but the impact of business exit would be far greater, as associated spending ripples through the economy, conservatively tying $30 billion in city tax revenue to business-driven activities. Ten major financial firms alone could reduce NYC tax revenue by $5 billion. The city is at enormous risk, made all the greater by the well understood impact of technology. At a minimum, no financial firm needs to be in New York any longer, especially when the most needed 1,000 firms are specifically targeted by Mamdani for sharply higher taxes.
Put it all together, and New York City revenues are likely to decline, permanently, by at least $10 billion due directly to Mamdani’s actions, adding to $5.5 billion in structural deficits, on top of an already slapdash concoction of sticks and glue that is New York State, made worse by implementation of devastating, and costly, Democratic Socialist Party principles, with President Trump vowing to restrict federal spending to the “bare minimum required by law.”
Read the whole thing for the full gory details.
I read somewhere that actor John Voigt has implored POTUS to somehow overturn the NYC election results, but of course Trump can’t — and shouldn’t. Why not?
Because at some point the vacuous dreams and economic stupidity of Marxists need to explode, spectacularly, so that the people who did not learn the lessons of 1990s Detroit can have their noses rubbed in the foul dirt of utter financial bankruptcy.
And then they have to shoulder the burden of rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up, just as the Germans had to rebuild the shattered German state after 1945 — only without the lifeline of any kind of federal Marshall Plan, because New York City doesn’t deserve it. New Yorkers have always had an unhealthy sense of their own importance and urban grandeur, and this time their collapse through stupidity and cupidity will actually be well deserved.
H.L. Mencken once defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Well, New Yorkers exercised their democratic rights… and now the fun begins.
The Demorats in Virginia have big plans for raising taxes as well. https://thecommonwealthinstitute.org/tci_research/reforming-virginias-tax-code-fairness-protect-increase-investment/
From Imperial Rome, to Jamestown Colony to the Soviet Union, socialists/communists/Leftists of all stripes, including current Democrats, have brought misery, decay and death to every single place they’ve tried it. Their governing philosophy has NEVER worked because it denies self-interest that is always part of human nature, and throwing more money at it won’t change it one bit.
Ever since that racist, Marxist POS Obama showed up, Dems have been doing their best to turn America into a third world hellhole.
I want them to lose elections, again and again, because I’m sick of Democrats buying votes with taxpayer money and making bullshit promises without delivery. I can’t stand it any more. Fix infrastructure? Ha ha. How about Bydem’s $7 billion to build 500,000 EV charging stations, and only eight built in four years? How about Gov. Newsom Hair Gel’s $25 billion railroad to nowhere without a foot of track laid? Dems can’t find their asses with two hands, never mind fix anything but an election. I’m pissed off with endlessly hearing the Dem’s trite, whiny, never-ending mantra “billionaires and millionaires” and their projection wherein they accuse conservatives and Repubs of doing what exactly what they’ve been doing as SOP for years. 95% of them are infantile and the others are evil and/or hypocritical liars.
I can’t decide which category the Commonwealth Institute belongs to, so I’ll take the more obvious path from their avatars and declare the organization should be renamed The Twocunts Institute.
Cities are artifacts of human social evolution ratified by the industrial revolution. The world is currently testing the hypothesis that they are brittle, obsolete constructs that are unable to generate enough value to keep the water, food and fuel pipelines upon which they so desperately depend flowing.
I think we’re at the point where cities and their denizens intuit their fragility and lack of productive capacity, and so have pivoted to value capture rather than generation.
I have yet to hear a compelling rebuttal to this thesis.
>>”And then they have to shoulder the burden of rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up, just as the Germans had to rebuild the shattered German state after 1945 ”
That can only be allowed when the proponents of socialism understand themselves to be undone by their choices, defeated in detail, and that their theology was false to its very core.
Anything less than that lets “The theory was right, the implementation was lacking” virus escape to take root and start the cycle anew.
Which is a given, as that’s how they ALWAYS react to failure. And they ALWAYS blame that failure not on the fundamental flaws of their ideology but on “sabotage” by “right wing saboteurs”.
“…they ALWAYS blame that failure not on the fundamental flaws of their ideology but on “sabotage” …”
and we haven’t spent enough money on it yet. See: government schools.
The voters in Seattle decided that they weren’t going to let New Yorkers have all the Fun. They elected their own ” Democratic Socialist “. and then they went further and realized that they needed to help her so they also elected fellow travelers to city council and City Attorney spots as well. Then in her acceptance speech she promised to “fill her cabinet with people from Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and People of Color communities as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.”
Can someone please tell me who else has been added to the ” 2SLGBTQIA+ community” ???
……. on 2nd thought …… maybe I really don’t want to know…
Pass the popcorn instead
I think the whole ethos can be encapsulated by “LGBTOSTFU”.
I have no problem with the state of New York throwing their allocation of federal monies into the cesspool of NYC.. They got voted in, let them do what they want.
I do have a major bit of heartburn wondering when the NYSE and trading houses will move out of the city to a more business friendly area. Higher fees mean less return on my investments.
With technology there is no excuse to be there anymore.
Instead of helping New Yorkers move to free states to vote marxists in there, I say wall ’em in and let ’em fulfill their proletariat destinies. Nobody needs these dipshits spreading their leftist cheer.
Let them finally realize what the glory of Scientific Socialism is in reality –
They will envy the East Germans/East Berliners that escaped, while they huddle around their fires in the subway tunnels of what WAS the most vibrant and wealthy city in the world.
Glenn Reynolds (Insty) has the ‘Welcome Wagon Policy for Refugees from Liberal Hellholes’ – made to learn what makes their new home great, why they left, and are provisional until they understand the new locales and should NOT import the bad\rot from which they came…
Mamdani seems to be operating on the assumption that the financial industry in New York is not only the goose that lays the golden egg, but that it can lay even more golden eggs and cannot go elsewhere. Even the goose that lays the golden eggs can only lay those eggs at some limited rate and geese are mobile. The New York financial industry could move elsewhere the same way the Detroit auto industry largely moved elsewhere. Detroit seems to be slowly recovering, but it has been a rough three or four decades. New York has the potential to make Detroit’s problems look like child’s play.