Tom Brady won the Super Bowl for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after 20 years in New England. Supermarket and property magnate John Catsimatidis, a New Yorker for most of his 72 years, recently told the Post that he will build in Miami if the city blocks his expansion plans on Coney Island. There is a lesson to be learned here.
Faith in the Big Apple’s future is rooted in the belief that our most productive and talented class will never leave the city. Gotham’s blood is presumed to run through the veins of our boosters and agitators who would never turn their backs on us.
That’s what people in Boston thought about Tom Brady.
But after six Super Bowl victories with the Patriots, Brady felt a little lost. He accepted smaller contracts than others of his caliber. Coach Bill Belichick rewarded the star defender by trying to negotiate him until he was defeated by owner Robert Kraft. The team refused to offer Brady a long-term contract last year, forcing GOAT to accept a one-year contract at age 42 – or find another home. He went to the Buccaneers and never looked back, winning his seventh Super Bowl last Sunday.
All of this proves: loyalty to a person’s hometown is not sacrosanct. Love only goes so far when you are betrayed by the place where you invested a large part of your life and fortune.
Now consider the Big Apple punished by the pandemic – staggering from miserable political “leadership”, lawless subway platforms, uncollected garbage, uncontrolled homelessness, chaotic schools and struggling businesses and cultural institutions. If the city ever needed a percent in finance, real estate and philanthropy to bring football to us, now it is more than ever. They helped save us from bankruptcy in the 1970s and lift us out of the depths after 9/11.
But today they are seen as chopped liver in City Hall and Albany, where political hackers are insulting them – and also the middle class. Our vain cops don’t realize that a handful of people who earn more than $ 1 million a year – about 37,800 in a city of 8.3 million – already pay 43% of the city’s income tax.
Governor Cuomo, after rejecting higher taxes last year, declared last month that he now wants to raise state taxes on New Yorkers who earn over $ 5 million a year from 8.82% to 10.86% to obtain a 14.7% municipal-state income tax. “The highest income tax in the country,” he said proudly. In other words: plunge the rich to cover deficits caused by their government’s reckless mismanagement. This would come in addition to a recently raised “mansion” tax on the sale of properties over $ 2 million and a proposed stock transfer transfer tax that would decimate Wall Street.
Meanwhile, Blasio’s mayor prefers to focus on the “millions and millions of people who are the backbone of New York City. . . I’m not going to beg anyone to stay, ”he said last summer. “I was concerned to hear this concept that, as wealthy people have a set of concerns about the city, we must accommodate them, we must build our policies and approaches around them,” he added. “This is not how it works around here anymore.” In other words, he would prefer billionaires like William Rudin, Ken Langone, David Koch and Michael Bloomberg – all great philanthropists – to take a walk.
It’s already happening. Investor Carl Icahn is moving his company to South Florida. Investment firm AllianceBernstein is moving most of its operations to Nashville, Tennessee. Ken Griffin’s Citadel is expanding to Palm Beach. Even the mighty Goldman Sachs can move its asset management division to Florida, a state without a state or municipal income tax. And last week, Stacey Cunningham, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, warned that the entire operation could flee the city to unknown parties if the share transfer tax is levied.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers who are merely wealthy are terrified of mayoral candidates whose first language is “waking up”. They are going to South Florida. Our metropolitan area is losing about 270 people a day, against 100 just two years ago, most of them to Florida. Big Apple restaurants, strangled by New York rules, are also opening in Miami, ideal for business, as fast as they can.
Of course, the more talent left, the more it will come. Brady took former New England teammates Rob Gronkowski and Antonio Brown with him to Tampa Bay. The two players scored three touchdowns last week, while Patriots fans wept over the sorry situation of their once powerful team. For the thrill of punishing the perverse one percent, our business-hating political class would do the same for New York City.