Here is the column:
“Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leavin’ today” — that’s how the famous song “New York, New York” captures the Big Apple’s draw.
Today, the line is becoming more ironic than iconic: Many people are indeed leaving … from New York, New York.
Worse yet, those “vagabond shoes” that “are longing to stray” are on the feet of the wealthiest New Yorkers.
And as they flee, according to a new study, they’re taking away billions in badly needed tax revenue.
As Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others pledge massive social programs and free services by taxing the wealthy, the wealthy are just melting away.
The reason is simple: if “you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
In today’s economy, it’s no longer necessary or even particularly beneficial to be in New York to make money in financial and other areas.
When any business meeting is a screen and a click away, you can go to a low-tax state like Florida or Texas and do as well as you can in the Big Apple.
Not surprisingly, many are choosing the money over the mystique and the madness.
This week the Citizens Budget Commission reported that New York’s share of millionaires fell from 12.7% in 2010 to 8.7% in 2022 — the largest drop of any state.
The exodus of wealthy citizens left New York short $10.7 billion in tax revenue.
By denouncing the remaining wealthy as effectively freeloaders who are “not paying their fair share,” Mamdani is only spurring them on.
It’s a demonstrably false claim that I discuss in my book Rage and the Republic — and part of a growing class-warfare theme the left is deliberately using to fuel political rage.
Yet it’s easy to form a mob — and far more difficult to control it.
That is particularly the case when your economic policies destroy your economy, and your ability to pay for all the free services that you’ve promised.
There’s a good-faith debate to be had over optimal tax levels, but the fact is that the top 10% of Americans pay more in taxes than the other 90% of the country. The top 1% pays roughly 40% of federal taxes.
As rational actors flee the state, Mamdani and New York Democrats are forced to cull the shrinking herd of high-end taxpayers who remain, layering on special fees like a pied-à-terre tax to be imposed on NYC’s luxury property owners.
And rather than change course to make New York a more attractive place to do business and live, national Democrats are moving to make other states no better — by nationalizing wealth taxes and by taxing fleeing citizens as if they still lived in the state.
Many are following Sen. Bernie Sanders’ and Rep. Ro Khanna’s call to impose a federal wealth tax they’ve dubbed the Billionaire Tax.
The idea is to stem the exodus from California and New York by giving the highest earners no place to go . . . except out of the country.
That’s the option many took when similar wealth taxes were attempted in countries like France, only to be rescinded after doing massive economic damage.
Fleecing the wealthy is a revenue loser.
New York is losing billions, and California has reportedly lost trillions due to top taxpayers’ departure.
Unwilling to adopt greater fiscal restraints and truly compete for businesses and residents, Democrats are looking for pockets of new areas to tax.
The wealth tax is a virtual bonanza of untapped revenue — if it can make it through the courts.
Our Constitution was amended in 1913 to allow for an income tax, not a wealth tax.
Once you pay taxes on what you earn, you’re supposed to be able to use your hard-earned money to buy whatever you wish, from bikes to boats.
Democrats now want to tax those possessions: “your Rembrandts, your stock portfolio, your diamonds and your yachts,” as Sen. Elizabeth Warren once dramatically warned.
And Khanna recently confirmed what some of us have been saying for years: The Billionaire Tax isn’t only for billionaires.
“The tax should not stop at billionaires,” he said in a pitch to his party’s rising socialist movement; “it must reach centimillionaires. The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up.”
Khanna and others hope that, once taken nationally, a wealth tax would destroy the benefit of moving to low-tax states — and open up literally trillions in new potential revenue.
In the meantime, New York will continue to burn billions as it taps its dwindling number of millionaires.
As their wealthy neighbors depart, those remaining will have to make up for their loss.
Being among the last to leave New York will be a costly distinction.
They will indeed “wake up” — and find that they’re “king of the hill, top of the list” for wealth redistribution.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times bestselling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”