Fine, Gov. Kathy Hochul was elbowing the Mamdani fanboys of “Patriotic Millionaires” last week with her snarky appeal for wealthy ex-New Yorkers to return from Florida to help fund the state’s gold-plated social programs.
That doesn’t change the fact that she herself has contemptuously told people to head off to the Sunshine State if they have complaints about Democrats’ misrule here, nor that she’s done vanishingly little to reverse the policies that have sent so many fleeing to Florida, Texas and other points south.
“I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state,” Hochul quipped — zinging the Democratic Socialists who say New York has no need for billionaires, and also the self-styled seven-figure “patriots” echoing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s demands for state tax hikes to find his New York City dreams.
Fine, she sees how high-income flight has “eroded” New York’s tax base.
It doesn’t erase her 2022 rant on how her Republican critics should “just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong. OK? Get out of town. Because you don’t represent our values.”
Remarks she basically repeated in 2024, denouncing any New Yorker who votes Republican as “anti-American.”
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In this, she channels her predecessor, who in 2014 similarly insisted his critics “have no place in the state of New York.”
That is: Supposed “moderates” like Hochul and Andrew Cuomo are fundamentally allied with the radicals they pretend to protect against: They go along with or actively promote the lunatic energy policies, pro-crime laws, wasteful and corrupt welfare-state spending that drive regular folks nuts, as well as virtually all the high taxes (and intrusive regulation) that sends top earners and businesses out of state.
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Or ensures they never set up shop here in the first place.
It’s not just the wealthy: Insatiable Albany gives middle class New Yorkers ample reason to flee.
Hochul last week moved on from snark to lay out how the Empire State is “in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden on their corporations and their individuals” — yet at best she manages to avoid making that burden worse, at least as long as she has another election to win and more campaign donations to solicit.
What New York needs are leaders willing to reduce that tax burden — and slash the obscene spending those taxes have to pay for.