(Daily Signal)—New York isn’t going to be able to tax and spend its way out of this mess.
A series of recently released reports highlights how the state of New York has put itself on a long-term path toward calamity.
New York is caught in the same doom loop that’s entrapped California and other big, blue states that have squandered their wealth while setting themselves up for a future of decline and mass departures.
On Monday, the New York Post reported on research done by the Citizens Budget Committee that found that New York has seen an exodus of millionaires over the last decade. In fact, no state has seen such a decline since 2010.
“The state went from having 12.7% of all millionaires in the nation to 8.7%,” the Post reported.
Now, the more dimwitted leftists may take this moment to celebrate this as a win for equality as they tell the departing rich, “Bye, bye! Teehee.” But those with a room-temperature IQ will understand that this has created quite a dilemma for their entire political project.
“New York’s declining share of high-income taxpayers has meaningful consequences,” the Citizens Budget Committee report noted. “Had New York maintained its share of the nation’s millionaires over the past decade, personal income tax collections would have been substantially higher – roughly $10.7 billion more in tax year 2022.”
The findings of the report account for data up to 2022, but there’s little sign that the taxpayer exodus has abated.
You can see why New York’s Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul suddenly changed her tune about constituents fleeing her governance and started begging rich Floridians to come back to be taxed.
I don’t think I have to tell the ex-New Yorkers sipping their pina coladas by the beach to ignore Hochul’s request.
When asked about the report’s findings, all she could come up with was blaming President Donald Trump and Republicans for reducing state and local tax deductions as if it’s the federal government’s responsibility to protect states like New York from their own bad decisions.
Funny enough, while Hochul is blaming Trump for her troubles and asking for wealthy taxpayers to return, she’s actively driving off potential tax revenue from elsewhere. On Tuesday, she announced that the state is putting a moratorium on data centers.
Now these data centers may be annoying to locals—most Americans dislike them—but they do represent a potentially huge amount of lost revenue for the state. Trump called them “money machines” in a Truth Social post on Wednesday.
Can New York really afford to drive them away now?
The reason energy costs are so high in places like New York isn’t the data centers; it’s mostly due to climate regulations and other self-destructive policies. It doesn’t seem like they are in a hurry to fix that issue any time soon.
In fact, on the kooky climate policies front, things look to be getting a lot worse soon as the state scrambles to comply with the 2019 climate mandate law.
New York’s dysfunction goes beyond losing millionaires and now data centers. It is bleeding middle-class residents and adding more people at the lowest end of the income spectrum, too.
A separate report by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli painted a fuller picture of what’s happening in New York. The most worrying population collapse isn’t happening among millionaires, it’s the departure of middle- and upper-middle-income families.
The report noted found that in 2024 there was “net out-migration of 13,662 taxpayers—a loss of approximately 1 in 1,000 resident taxpayers” and that outmigration was disproportionately “married households with incomes between $100,000 and $500,000.”
“On a net basis, almost 8,200 such [tax] filers moved out of New York in 2024, 0.7% of resident taxpayers in that category,” DiNapoli wrote. “The highest out-migration rates are for households making $500,000 or more – 1% of these taxpayers left the state in 2024.”
Not great.
And on top of New York’s growing list of financial problems is the fact that New York City, which drives large parts of the state’s economy, decided to elect socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani. That’s another nasty side effect of losing families and replacing them with overly educated, under-employed transient singles with a passion for wearing keffiyehs, dying their hair blue, and socialism.
The city has dug itself into a hole and is now attempting to see if that hole goes all the way to China.
Meanwhile, Mamdani’s done everything short of putting up signs outside city limits saying to businesses and the wealthy, “Don’t come here or we’ll eat you.”
New York City can carry on like this for a little while, but at some point, the budget gimmicks won’t work, there will be no juice to be squeezed, and they’ll have to go to the state looking for a bailout, a state that may soon need a lifeline of its own.
It’s getting bleak in the Empire State, which is looking more like the fading British “empire” these days.
