Have you been listening to the Hell Gate Podcast? You can catch last week's episode here.
One of the most oft-repeated refrains from powerful New Yorkers is that if you continue to raise taxes on the wealthy, like Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is proposing, the rich would simply leave New York to run off to states with lower taxes.
"We have to stop the exodus," Andrew Cuomo railed in a Fox Business appearance last week.
"If Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York, you're going to see the flight of businesses from New York," hedge fund tycoon Bill Ackman said this summer. "It only takes a handful of successful people to leave to decimate the city’s tax base."
And Governor Kathy Hochul has been opposed to higher taxes on the wealthy for that very reason, saying after Mamdani's primary victory this June that "a lot of people leave our state because of the taxes."
But did New York's last big tax increase on the wealthy actually drive our millionaires to Florida?