Nice, Gov. Kathy Hochul was elbowing the Mamdani fanboys of “Patriotic Millionaires” final week along with her snarky attraction for rich ex-New Yorkers to return from Florida to assist fund the state’s gold-plated social packages.
That doesn’t change the truth that she herself has contemptuously instructed folks to go off to the Sunshine State if they’ve complaints about Democrats’ misrule right here, nor that she’s performed vanishingly little to reverse the insurance policies which have despatched so many fleeing to Florida, Texas and different factors south.
“I would like people who find themselves excessive internet value to help the beneficiant social packages that we need to have in our state,” Hochul quipped — zinging the Democratic Socialists who say New York has no want for billionaires, and likewise the self-styled seven-figure “patriots” echoing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s calls for for state tax hikes to seek out his New York Metropolis goals.
Nice, 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 ought to “simply soar on a bus and head all the way down to Florida the place you belong. OK? Get out of city. Since you don’t symbolize our values.”
Remarks she principally repeated in 2024, denouncing any New Yorker who votes Republican as “anti-American.”
On this, she channels her predecessor, who in 2014 equally insisted his critics “don’t have any place within the state of New York.”
That’s: Supposed “moderates” like Hochul and Andrew Cuomo are essentially allied with the radicals they fake to guard in opposition to: They go together with or actively promote the lunatic power insurance policies, pro-crime legal guidelines, wasteful and corrupt welfare-state spending that drive common people nuts, in addition to just about all of the excessive taxes (and intrusive regulation) that sends prime earners and companies out of state.
Or ensures they by no means arrange store right here within the first place.
It’s not simply the rich: Insatiable Albany offers center class New Yorkers ample motive to flee.
Hochul final week moved on from snark to put out how the Empire State is “in competitors with different states who’ve much less of a tax burden on their companies and their people” — but at greatest she manages to keep away from making that burden worse, at the least so long as she has one other election to win and extra marketing campaign donations to solicit.
What New York wants is leaders keen to scale back that tax burden — and slash the obscene spending these taxes need to pay for.
