Tom Brady won the Super Bowl for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after 20 years in New England. Supermarket and real estate magnate John Catsimatidis, for most of his 72 years, a New Yorker, recently told The Post he would build in Miami if City Hall blocked his Coney Island expansion plans. Here you can draw a lesson.
Belief in the Big Apple future is rooted in the belief that our most productive and talented class will never leave the city. It is accepted that Gotham’s blood runs in the veins of our movers and shakers who will never turn their backs on us.
This is what the people in Boston thought about Tom Brady.
But after six Super Bowl wins with the Patriots, Brady feels taken for granted. He accepted smaller contracts than others of his caliber. Coach Bill Belichick rewarded the star quarterback by trying to trade him until he was dominated by owner Robert Kraft. The team last year refused to offer Brady a long-term contract, forcing the BOK to accept a one-year deal at the age of 42 – or find another home. He’s been to the Buccaneers and never looked back and won his seventh Super Bowl last Sunday.
It proves it all: Loyalty to one’s hometown is not sacred. Love only goes so far as to be betrayed by the place where you have invested much of your life and your fortune.
Think now of the pandemic-ridden Big Apple – which is brutalized by miserable political ‘leadership’, lawless subway platforms, uncollected rubbish, uncontrolled homelessness, chaotic schools and struggling businesses and cultural institutions. If the city ever needed the one percent in finance, real estate and philanthropy to carry the football for us, it is now more than ever before. They helped save us from bankruptcy in the 1970s and got us out of the depths after 9/11.
But today they are seen as chopped liver in the town hall and in Albany, where political heels disrupt them – and also the middle class. Our pandering poles do not appreciate that a relative handful of more than $ 1 million in annual earnings – about 37,800 in a city of 8.3 million – already pay 43 percent of the city’s income tax.
The Cuomo government, after rejecting higher taxes last year, announced last month that it now wants to raise taxes on New Yorkers earning more than $ 5 million a year from 8.82 percent to 10.86 percent to to achieve a combined income tax of 14.7 percent. “The highest income tax in the country,” he said proudly. In other words: Soak the rich to cover deficits that are to blame for the reckless mismanagement of his government. This comes in addition to a recently increased “mansion” tax on property sales of more than $ 2 million, and a proposed tax on stock sales that will reduce Wall Street.
Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio would rather focus on the ‘millions upon millions of people who are the backbone of New York City. . . “I’m not going to beg anyone to stay,” he said last summer. “It was difficult for me to hear this concept, because rich people are concerned about the city that we have to accommodate them, that we have to build our policies and approaches around them,” he added. “It no longer works here.” 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 the firm to Nashville, Tennessee, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel is expanding to Palm Beach. Even powerful Goldman Sachs can move its asset management division to Florida, a state without state or city tax revenue. Last week, Stacey Cunningham, president of the New York Stock Exchange, warned that the entire operation could flee the city for unknown parts if the tax on shares is transferred.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers who are merely prosperous are afraid of the death of mayoral candidates whose first language is ‘awake’. They are rather on their way to South Florida. Our metropolitan area loses an estimated 270 people a day, compared to 100 just two years ago, most of whom are in Florida. Big Apple restaurants, strangled by the New York rules, also open as quickly as possible in business-friendly Miami.
The more talent goes away there, the more it will naturally follow. Brady took former New England teammates Rob Gronkowski and Antonio Brown with him to Tampa Bay. The two players recorded three hits last week while Patriots fans cried over their once mighty team’s deplorable situation. For the excitement of punishing the wicked one percent, our aimless political class would happily do the same to New York City.