Tom Brady won the Super Bowl for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after 20 years in New England. Supermarket and real estate magnate John Catsimatidis, a New Yorker for most of his 72 years, recently told The Post that he will build in Miami if City Hall blocks its expansion plans on Coney Island. There is a lesson to be learned here.
Belief in the future of the Big Apple is rooted in the belief that our most productive and talented class will never leave the city. Gotham’s blood is believed to run through the veins of our movers and shakers who never turn their backs on us.
That’s what the people in Boston thought about Tom Brady.
But after six Super Bowl wins with the Patriots, Brady felt taken for granted. He accepted smaller contracts than others of his caliber. Coach Bill Belichick rewarded the star quarterback by trying to trade him in until he was overruled by owner Robert Kraft. The team declined to offer Brady a long-term contract last year, forcing the GOAT to accept a one-year contract at the age of 42 – or find another home. He went to the Buccaneers and never looked back, winning his seventh Super Bowl last Sunday.
All this proves: loyalty to one’s own city is not sacred. Love only goes so far as being betrayed by the place where you have invested much of your life and your fortune.
Now think of the pandemic-ravaged Big Apple – teetering with miserable political ‘leadership’, lawless metro platforms, uncollected trash, uncontrolled homelessness, chaotic schools and struggling businesses and cultural institutions. If the city ever needed the one percent in finance, real estate and philanthropy to carry football for us, it is now more than ever. They helped us from bankruptcy in the 1970s and lifted us out of the depths after 9/11.
But today they are seen as chopped liver in City Hall and in Albany, where they are challenged by political hacks – and by the middle class as well. Our pandering wrist doesn’t appreciate that a relatively handful of $ 1 million plus annual earners – some 37,800 in a city of 8.3 million residents – already pay 43 percent of the city’s income tax.
Gov. Cuomo, after rejecting higher taxes last year, stated last month that it now wants to increase state taxes for New Yorkers earning more than $ 5 million a year from 8.82 percent to 10.86 percent to get a combined income tax. of the state and city of 14.7 percent. “The highest income tax in the country,” he said proudly. In other words, let the rich soak to cover deficits blamed for his government’s reckless mismanagement. This would be in addition to a recently increased “mansion” tax on the sale of properties in excess of $ 2 million and a proposed stock transfer tax that would decimate Wall Street.
Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio prefers to focus on the “ millions and millions of people who make up the backbone of New York City. I’m not going to beg anyone to stay, ”he said last summer. “I had a hard time hearing this concept that because wealthy people are concerned about the city that we have to house them, that we have to build our policies and our approach around them,” he added. “It doesn’t work like that here anymore.” In other words, he would rather have billionaires like William Rudin, Ken Langone, David Koch and Michael Bloomberg – all great philanthropists – take a walk.
It’s already happening. Investor Carl Icahn is moving his company to South Florida. Investment company AllianceBernstein relocates most of its operations to Nashville, Tenn. Ken Griffin’s Citadel expands to Palm Beach. Even the mighty Goldman Sachs could move its wealth management division to Florida, a state with no state or municipal income tax. And last week, Stacey Cunningham, president of the New York Stock Exchange, warned that the entire operation could flee the city to unknown parts if the transfer tax is imposed.
Meanwhile, mere affluent New Yorkers are terrified of mayoral candidates whose native language is “awake.” They go to South Florida instead. Our metropolitan area is losing an estimated 270 people a day, up from 100 just two years ago, most of them to Florida. Big Apple restaurants, strangled by New York rules, are also opening as soon as possible in business-friendly Miami.
Of course, the more talent that leaves, the more that will follow. Brady took former New England teammates Rob Gronkowski and Antonio Brown to Tampa Bay. The two players scored three touchdowns last week as Patriots fans wept over the appalling condition of their once-powerful team. For the thrill of punishing the bad one percent, our business-hating political class would like to do the same with New York City.