Tom Brady won the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Super Bowl after 20 years in New England. Real estate and supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis, a New Yorker for most of his 72 years, recently told The Post that he will build in Miami if City Hall blocks its Coney Island expansion plans. Here a lesson is drawn.
Faith in the future of the Big Apple is rooted in the belief that our most productive and talented class will never leave the city. The blood of Gotham is supposed to run in the veins of our movers and shakers who would never turn their backs on us.
This is what the people of Boston thought about Tom Brady.
But after six Super Bowl wins with the Patriots, Brady felt taken for granted. He accepted smaller contracts than others of his caliber. Coach Bill Belichick rewarded the star quarterback for trying to change him until he was overturned by owner Robert Kraft. The team refused to offer Brady a long-term contract last year, forcing GOAT to accept a one-year deal at age 42 or find another home. He went to the Buccaneers and never looked back, winning his seventh Super Bowl last Sunday.
All this proves: loyalty to the hometown is not sacrosanct. Love only goes so far when it betrays you the place where you have invested much of your life and fortune.
Think now of the big apple, battered by a pandemic, which causes miserable political “leaderships”, lawless subway platforms, uncollected garbage, uncontrolled homelessness, chaotic schools and troubled companies and cultural institutions. If ever the city needed the percentage of 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 took us out of the depths after 9/11.
But today they are seen as chopped liver in City Hall and Albany, where political pirates hide them, and also the middle class. Our police officers don’t appreciate that a relative handful of more than a million dollars more (about 37,800 in a city of 8.3 million) already pay 43% of the city’s income taxes.
Governor Cuomo, after rejecting higher taxes last year, said last month that he now wants to raise state taxes on New Yorkers who earn more than $ 5 million a year from 8.82% to 10.86 % to get a combined state-city income tax of 14.7%, “The highest income tax in the country,” he said proudly. In other words: submerge the rich to cover deficits that are to blame for the reckless mismanagement of their administration. This would add to a recently raised “mansion” tax on the sale of more than $ 2 million in property and a stock transfer tax that would propose to 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 ask anyone to stay,” he said last summer. . “I was concerned to hear this concept that because wealthy people have a number of concerns about the city that we should welcome them, we should build our policies and approaches around them,” he added. “It’s no longer how it works here.” In other words, I 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 relocates his company to South Florida. Investment firm AllianceBernstein moves most of its operations to Nashville, Tennessee. Ken Griffin’s Citadel is expanding to Palm Beach. Even the powerful Goldman Sachs could move its asset management division to Florida, a state with no state or city income taxes. And last week, Stacey Cunningham, president of the New York Stock Exchange, warned that the entire operation could flee the city by unknown parties if the stock transfer tax is imposed.
Meanwhile, affluent New Yorkers are afraid of dying for mayoral candidates whose first language is “awake.” Instead, they head to South Florida. Our metropolitan area loses about 270 people a day, up from 100 just two years ago, most in Florida. Big Apple restaurants, strangled by New York rules, are also opening in Miami, for businesses, as quickly as they can.
Of course, the more talent you leave, the more you will follow. Brady took his New England teammates Rob Gronkowski and Antonio Brown with him to Tampa Bay. The two players scored three touchdowns last week as Patriots fans mourned the plight of their powerful team. For the thrill of punishing the evil one percent, our political class that hates business would happily do the same with New York City.