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The real affordability crisis is in the cities where Democrats rule

Sometimes people just vote with their feet. And a new poll out this week suggests many New Yorkers might be willing to do just that.

The Marist poll reveals that one in three New Yorkers are planning to leave the State in the next five years.

After the week we’ve just had I suppose you might sympathize with the 7% of respondents who said they want to leave because they’re fed up with the weather.

It hasn’t been much fun trying to get around the streets as Mayor Mamdani´s paid volunteers made their unsupervised efforts to push the snow around. At the cost of $30 an hour per shoveler.

But the main reason people say they want to leave New York is that eight out of ten respondents say the city has become unaffordable. Due to daily living costs, rent, taxes and more.

Yet here is the strange thing. The Democrats keep talking about the cost-of-living crisis in New York. But they talk about it as though it has nothing to do with them.

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Don’t we have a Democrat Mayor? And wasn’t the last Mayor a Democrat? And the one before him?

Governor Kathy Hochul is a Democrat. As was the Governor before her. And the Governor before him. And so on.

So when the people in charge talk about New York’s cost of living crisis, why do they talk about it as though it is like a snowstorm? Some sort of natural disaster? Or even a problem that their political rivals are responsible for?

Our new Mayor has already threatened to address the city’s historic deficit by raising property taxes. In Mamdani-land this is the sort of thing which affects only the super-rich. People who are able to afford to buy a property in New York. But he campaigned on a promise that he would stop New York becoming unaffordable to renters.

And just who does he think those increased property taxes will be passed onto? You don’t have to be a fiscal genius to know that landlords will pass on any property tax increases to their tenants.

Mamdani’s proposed property tax increases will target households with an income of around $122,000 a year. And while that might seem high in many parts of the country, in New York that means that a couple who are each bringing in $60K a year will be taxed as if they are the super-rich.

In fact it will be middle-class New Yorkers who are already struggling with childcare and much more who will be affected. Can anyone blame people for feeling the squeeze and considering hot-footing it out of the place?

Because it isn’t just on the big things like rent that the Democrats in Albany make everyone´s life unaffordable. It is on the small things too.

I am not a very good prepper. I’m not even a very good shopper. So in the middle of the snowstorm this week, with the fridge running empty, I popped into one of my local sandwich shops. And like many New Yorkers I was once again stunned again at how robbed I feel every time I buy a lunchtime wrap and a soda.

While feeling infinitely grateful to the workers who showed up to keep New York businesses going, I still had the usual thought. How can a take-out sandwich lunch end up costing you somewhere between $20 and $30? Does it feel like you’re getting your money’s-worth?

Not to me it doesn’t. But again this is because of costs and taxes that our elected officials have chosen to levy on the people of New York.

Governor Hochul has recently been boasting about how marvelously the city’s congestion charge has worked. She gloats about the extra money for investment in critical infrastructure and claims that the air is cleaner and the city already easier to get around. But as many people warned, congestion charging is simply another tax.

All those small businesses in New York — including the food delivery trucks and much more — end up paying this extra tax. And since to the sadness of our Democratic Socialist friends, businesses are not charitable organizations, naturally these costs are passed on to the customer.

If you wonder why your lunchtime sandwich costs more and more it is because of taxes like these — hidden and otherwise.

When Democrats complain about the cost of living in New York do they never wonder whether their policies haven’t caused the problem?

Even if one third of New Yorkers actually do leave, don´t expect any lessons to be learned from it. On the other side of the country we can already see what the political response would look like.

In California Governor Newsom has repeatedly claimed that the California exodus is just not happening. Last summer he called suggestions of any such exodus “bulls–t”.

Newsom insists that talk of people leaving California because of the high taxes and cost of living is just a right-wing smear. An invention of his Republican opponents.

In fact the Golden State has seen consistently high out-migration. Including by some of its richest residents. That includes the 1% of California’s highest earners who pay almost half the state’s personal income tax revenue.

The only reason Newson and others can even pretend to deny the exodus is because California still attracts so many foreign workers. But that doesn’t mean that all the overtaxed Californian locals who are fleeing are a figment of the right-wing imagination.

Still I would predict the same playbook to happen in New York if our own exodus occurs. Our Mayor and Governor will continue to say that New York has an affordability crisis. And they’ll continue to pretend that this crisis has nothing to do with them. And then if New Yorkers do follow through on their promise and leave the state we can expect those same leaders to say that it´s just a figment of our imagination. But it won’t be.

There are some disasters even easier to foresee than a severe weather warning. And these man-made disasters take an awful lot longer to clean up.

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