{"id":208070,"date":"2026-04-24T04:07:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T04:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/208070\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T04:07:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T04:07:13","slug":"mamdani-targeted-ken-griffin-cementing-nycs-death-spiral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/208070\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani targeted Ken Griffin \u2014 cementing NYC’s death spiral"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood outside Ken Griffin\u2019s apartment building<\/a> and grinned, \u201cToday we\u2019re taxing the rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said it like he was declaring victory.<\/p>\n

It was actually a eulogy for one of the greatest cities in the world.<\/p>\n

I know what happens when you get tax policy right, because I watched it happen when I was governor of Florida.<\/p>\n

For years, my state has taken advantage<\/a> of the way New York drove its residents and its most productive businesses straight to our door<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They brought their income, their companies, their employees, their charitable contributions and their tax dollars with them.<\/p>\n

Florida won; New York lost \u2014 and Mamdani has decided to double down on failure.<\/p>\n

\u201cTax the rich\u201d (or as de facto Democratic Party spokesperson Hasan Piker<\/a> would probably put it, \u201ckill the rich\u201d) has become the rallying cry for a party that either doesn\u2019t understand the competitive landscape between states, or doesn\u2019t understand basic math.<\/p>\n

For them, here\u2019s a lesson in how the socialism death spiral works.<\/p>\n

You tax the wealthy and job creators at punishing rates.<\/p>\n

They flee \u2014 and the tax base shrinks.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re left with a budget hole.<\/p>\n

Democrats decide the answer is to tax whoever remains even more.<\/p>\n

More people leave; the hole gets bigger.<\/p>\n

Repeat until your city or state is broke and completely unrecognizable, while denying that you created the problem.<\/p>\n

Any observer can see this is happening to New York \u2014 except its rulers.<\/p>\n

The Empire State has no clothes.<\/p>\n

This month, Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced New York\u2019s first-ever pied-\u00e0-terre tax<\/a>, an annual surcharge on properties valued above $5 million when the owner\u2019s primary residence is outside New York City.<\/p>\n

They claim it will generate $500 million a year, but they won\u2019t tell you what comes next.<\/p>\n

The moment those owners decide a $5 million property in a city that resents them isn\u2019t worth the annual bill, they sell.<\/p>\n

The revenue disappears, and property values overall soften.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not a budget fix; it\u2019s a spiteful political campaign targeting the very people who keep the city\u2019s finances afloat.<\/p>\n

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Which brings me back to Ken Griffin<\/a>, who not coincidentally moved himself and his company\u2019s headquarters from Chicago to South Florida in 2022.<\/a><\/p>\n

His Citadel hedge fund and Citadel Securities still employ thousands of people in New York City, generating good-paying jobs, local spending and a tax contribution that dwarfs almost any other single resident.<\/p>\n

Griffin\u2019s lifetime charitable giving exceeds $2 billion.<\/p>\n

He recently committed $400 million to New York\u2019s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s personally committed $10 million to help Citadel employees serve on nonprofit boards supporting health, anti-poverty and education organizations across the city, like Harlem Lacrosse and the New York Piano Society.<\/p>\n

So what does Mamdani do?<\/p>\n

He makes Griffin a political target.<\/p>\n

He stands outside Griffin\u2019s home<\/a> to name-and-shame him in a slick social-media video.<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s own mayor villainizes a man who employs thousands, pays an enormous local tax bill and has donated billions to causes benefiting New Yorkers.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t governance \u2014 it\u2019s class warfare dressed up as policy.<\/p>\n

And now, Griffin is threatening to abandon New York City altogether<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a different way.<\/p>\n

When I became governor of Florida, my administration cut taxes by more than $10 billion, reformed permitting, eliminated more than 5,000 needless regulations and recruited businesses aggressively.<\/p>\n

The best anti-poverty program any government can support is a job, and Florida built 1.7 million of them by getting government out of the way.<\/p>\n

I grew up in public housing, so I feel genuine sympathy for the working-class New Yorkers who can\u2019t pick up and move out.<\/p>\n

They will bear the heaviest burden of this socialist vision that\u2019s taking over New York, losing wages and opportunities while the politicians who caused the damage pat themselves on the back.<\/p>\n

To be clear, good economies don\u2019t last forever \u2014 something leaders in Florida and other red-state beneficiaries of New York\u2019s decline should keep keenly in mind.<\/p>\n

It takes constant, daily work to keep growing jobs and improving people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a tax cut here or there, it\u2019s a consistent focus on making states affordable for all families \u2014 which is why I\u2019ve never supported a tax or fee increase and never will.<\/p>\n

The competition between states gets more intense every day.<\/p>\n

Blue states want to tax their way into prosperity, but it always fails.<\/p>\n

Mamdani can keep hosting photo ops outside billionaires\u2019 buildings.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the people funding his city\u2019s budget will keep doing<\/a> what New Yorkers have been doing for years: They\u2019ll call the movers. <\/p>\n

Rick Scott represents Florida in the US Senate and served as the state\u2019s governor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood outside Ken Griffin\u2019s apartment building and grinned, \u201cToday we\u2019re…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3640,18649,1023,9,24,55,54,56,299,7754,16147,12515,2780,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-208070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-florida","9":"tag-ken-griffin","10":"tag-luxury-real-estate","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-city-news","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-opinion","17":"tag-property-taxes","18":"tag-rich","19":"tag-rick-scott","20":"tag-taxes","21":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}