It is not news that New York\u2019s political and media elites worship the extremely rich. You can see this when in a tough economy the New York Times publishes a \u201cWealth\u201d section fronted by a how-to piece on buying Irish castles. You can see it when you hear the city\u2019s billionaire mayor insisting that critics of wealth inequality should be quiet because they interfere with his dream to \u201cget all the Russian billionaires to move here.\u201d And you can see it when you behold Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., slamming a modest initiative to slightly increase taxes on the Big Apple\u2019s millionaires.<\/span>
<\/span>Again, none of this unto itself is all that newsy because it isn\u2019t all that new. New York\u2019s \u201clet them eat cake\u201d culture has been around for a long time in a city where almost half of all residents live below or near the poverty line. However, what is news is the extent to which this wealth-obsessed environment helps strengthen the mythologies that distort economic reality.<\/span>
<\/span>Cuomo\u2019s attack, in particular, perfectly illustrates this trend. Fresh off raising millions from wealthy donors for his political front group, the governor slammed Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio\u2019s tax hike proposal, claiming it will drive Cuomo\u2019s beloved millionaires out of the state.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cWhat they fear is that they\u2019re in a place where the taxes will continually go up and there will be a ceiling and they\u2019ll say, \u2018I\u2019m going to Florida,\u2019\u201d Cuomo said of the rich. \u201cI believe that.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span>Before you join Cuomo in weeping for the Manhattan fat cats supposedly forced to flee from economic persecution, remember that his story is a fantastical fact-free fable \u2014 one that conveniently serves the political interests of the aristocracy, but has nothing to do with reality.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nRich people leaving New Jersey and California actually fell<\/b> after taxes rose, and the decrease in millionaires in New York happened because their wages fell after the financial crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So not surprised. Studies show that the idle rich do not relocate over their tax levels: It is not news that New York\u2019s political and media elites worship the extremely rich. You can see this when in a tough economy the New York Times publishes a \u201cWealth\u201d section fronted by a how-to piece on buying …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,973,1003,992,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-economy","category-philosophy","category-statistics","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}