A friend of mine who runs a big finance-related firm here in New York City is scouting for new digs in Miami — not only for office space but also a house — and it’s not just about the taxes.
This fella, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is a name-brand financial type.
He’ll make headlines if he decides to bolt.
He employs plenty of people — from highly compensated executives to middle-class support staff.
They all pay their taxes in addition to their mortgages and grocery bills.
They drop plenty of cash at the Big Apple’s restaurants and theaters.
The higher-ups are big donors to local charities, the museums and the opera.
He says he hasn’t made up his mind just yet but based on the tenor of our conversation, he has at least one foot out the proverbial door. He’s serious.
What is crystal clear — and this is true of many of the business types I have spoken to who have packed up and left Gotham — is that this isn’t about paying a few more dollars a year in taxes.
They would have no problem if it funded good schools, or more policing or better roads and bridges.
It doesn’t, of course.
Most of all, they’re sick of being portrayed as the enemy by feckless public officials.
Foremost among the latter is our socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who would like you to believe that rich people are at fault for our affordability crisis because they drive up rents when they buy penthouses.
Or maybe it’s simply because they are the enemy in his version of Mao’s Little Red Book.
His solution is to milk them with a vast expansion of the welfare state.
He wants the rich “paying their fair share” of taxes, failing to note they already shoulder the brunt of the highest combined city and state income tax rate in the country.
Of course, he leaves out the fact that it’s the rich, the aspiring rich and the middle class that have always paid for big government here.
That includes billions every year in free healthcare for the indigent as well as major subsidies for food, housing and transportation.
He also fails to mention that rent control, a perk he enjoyed before his November election, drives up rents for free-market units even as it reduces incentives to create new housing stock.
‘Pied’ after they paid
Now Mamdani is looking to tax second homes worth more than $5 million for non-residents who pay property taxes.
We’re telling rich people who don’t use services to look for real estate elsewhere — and they will, if the story of London is any indication — while welcoming people who want all the welfare we can give.
Just look at the numbers of who’s coming and going from this once great city that attracted the best and the brightest: Our population is buttressed by a continued flow of poor migrants, while the taxpaying class flees to lower cost venues like Florida, Tennessee, Texas and South Carolina.
To be clear: I’m not shading the world’s poor who are seeking a better life; that’s part of my lineage.
But my lineage came here to build the subways, work in factories long before the city subsidized everything and chased out the rich who paid for it.
They also came here legally when we needed labor.
Blame game dishonest
So why would Mamdani do something as brazenly stupid and reckless as to film himself standing outside Ken Griffin’s townhouse, mock him for his success while the Citadel founder is considering a major expansion here?
Understandably, Griffin voiced disdain for the “creepy” social-media spot to tout a highly dubious pied-à-terre tax and is now weighing sending yet more jobs outside the city.
So are the people at Apollo Global, headed by co-founder and CEO Marc Rowan.
The private-equity giant, as I reported last week, is on the verge of moving a second HQ to Austin, Texas, or the Miami area, employing as many as 1,000 people who would have been New Yorkers if this city and its public officials understood who pays the bills.
I know I called Mamdani and his ilk feckless, but there is a theory that he is actually an ideologically driven, clever man seeking fewer capitalists to create his Marxist utopia.
He knows his blame game is intellectually dishonest: It’s the city’s costly welfare state that he wants to grow at all costs as opposed to the rich that is at the heart of our affordability crisis.
Or maybe our smirking commie of a mayor is just uninformed.
After all, if you spend your college years at protests and in Africana studies classes, you may find it hard to balance a checking account, much less a $127 billion budget that only the people he’s attacking can pay for.
