Why Would Anyone Stay in NYC?

RUSH: In recent days on this program, we talked about the tax increases scheduled for New York, the millionaires tax that will hit single people at $200,000 a year, married couples at $300,000 a year. We have learned that Governor Paterson has said if he had known that these tax increases would drive me out of New York as a place to do business, he would have raised taxes even sooner. They have said in New York that, ‘Look, New Jersey did this, and nobody left New Jersey.’ New Jersey? They’re holding out New Jersey as a paragon of economic virtue, they’re copying New Jersey? The fact is people are leaving New Jersey. The Wall Street Journal on Saturday ran a great editorial about New York being the tax capital of the year. And the question in New York is not, to me, why would I leave, why would I cease doing business in New York, the real question is why the hell would anybody stay there, particularly those in the $200 to $300,000 a year range, the new millionaire tax is going to hit ’em. And it’s not just the state. If they live in the city, it’s gonna be even worse.

But this is the thing that always gets to me. These liberals are always saying, ‘We’ve done it before and it was fine, last time we did this it worked out.’ But it never does. Nothing of liberalism ever works. Here are some quotes from the Wall Street Journal piece: Mr. Silver says of the coming tax increases, we’ve done this before, there hasn’t been a catastrophe. Really? New York is a catastrophe! New Jersey is a catastrophe! According to the Census Bureau, I said last week, you know, Mr. Paterson told Neil Cavuto when he asked me questions about this on his TV show, I said, ‘Look, the exodus has already begun, Neil, people are leaving Long Island in droves over property taxes alone. Housing prices have plummeted, but their real estate taxes haven’t, their real estate taxes have been high, you add ’em all up and it’s just difficult for people to get ahead there. They’re leaving. They’re going to places like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, going out to places like Arizona. ‘According to Census Bureau data, over the past decade 1.97 million New Yorkers left the state.’ That’s the biggest exodus of any state.

‘New York City has lost more than 75,000 jobs since last August, and many industrial areas upstate are as rundown as Detroit. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently said New York had the worst economic outlook of all 50 states, including Michigan. And that analysis was done before these $4 billion in new taxes.’ So the Wall Street Journal asks, ‘How does Mr. Silver define ‘catastrophe’?’ And one thing that’s going unmentioned in all of this with this so-called temporary income tax increase, the state of New York, that will lift the top state tax rate to 8.97%, but the city, New York City income tax rate, you know what it’s going to go up to with this? 12.62%. And as a former resident of the city I can tell you city taxes are perhaps more onerous than are state — 12.62% will be the New York City income tax rate coupled with the state tax rate of 8.9%. So add nine and 12.5%, makes it 21.5% percent on top of federal, if you live in the city of New York, because in New York City capital gains and dividends are taxed as ordinary income. So thus New York will impose the nation’s highest taxes on investment income. At the same time, Wall Street is in jeopardy of losing its status as the world’s financial capital, and the Obama administration is planning on imposing salary caps on everybody that lives on Wall Street, works on Wall Street in a populist move.