Conservatives warned of a mass exodus if the democratic socialist won, but experts, and property data, paint a very different picture
The warnings were stark. If Zohran Mamdani were to win the New York City mayoral election, his plans to raise taxes – slightly – on the city’s wealthiest residents would cause millionaires to bolt en masse, decamping to lower-tax states such as Florida and Texas.
The New York Post, a conservative tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, told readers on an almost daily basis through October that New York would effectively become a ghost town under Mamdani’s mayoralty, a propaganda campaign that concluded the day before the election with the bombastic claim that “nearly a million” people were planning to “flee”.
But a month after Mamdani’s historic win, there is no evidence that rich people are leaving the Big Apple. In fact, they seem to be committing to staying in New York.
Fun fact in ancient Athens only the rich payed taxes because it was seen as both a flex and civic duty, since if you had enough money to qualify it meant you were doing very good.
Also was a good way to not go the way of the tyrant.
They DID go the way of the tyrant a few times. And when they had a democracy they were a slave society that headed up an “alliance” of city-states that was essentially an empire and protection racket. Athens is cool and all but deeply flawed too.
Can we go back to using the dirty money in donations to build libraries and improving educational systems instead of each billionaire hyping the next hyper surveillance platform and hallucinating aggregators?