Don’t Cry For NY

by Chris

“They are investors, they have accountants, they are making informed decisions,” Cuomo said. “This is going to be the tipping point and people will now be making a geographical change.”

Yes, the informed decision is that paying the state up to 8.8% of your income (top bracket), up to 4.75% sales tax, and then also paying some of the most ridiculously high property taxes on top of that is not a winning proposition.  People with access to the internet can become informed that other states will grab a skinny fraction of those amounts which, for a typical house in an expensive district can be the equivalent of having a kid in college forever (with yearly property taxes = tuition).

Can’t blame Trump for any of that.  Nor for the obviously decrepit NY infrastructure decaying all over the state but especially the NYC region.  That’s on you NY.

I’m a little salty at NY because they have some of the most feared anti-gun laws, so draconian that even an off duty LEO from out of state has no rights to own or carry.  Automatic big trouble for everyone if you happen to be found with a gun.  You may not even transport a handgun through NY (even if locked in a case in a locked trunk without any ammo anywhere to be found) without a valid NY license.

Why do I care?

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Because NY is between me and most of the rest of the US so it complicates travel greatly and, I’ve heard, I would even be at risk if a plane I was on was diverted to NY for emergency reasons and I was legally transporting by airline, as I did when I went to Nevada for the Front Sight training.  Your plane is diverted, you land in NY, pick up your luggage and – oops! – you are now a NY felon.

So I figure that any state which is that interventionist and rigid deserves no sympathy from me as their utopia fails to pencil out.

More broadly, the high-tax, crumbling Northeast US region is in a bunch of trouble going forward.  They haven’t had any fiscal discipline in a very long time.

In my own town, there’s a rabble of well-meaning people who want to place a new library in town.  The old one still works fine, and could easily be fixed up for another 50-100 years of service.  But these folks want a new, gleaming library at a cost of more than $750/ft sq, which is standard government building math.  I have no idea what they are building it out of, but you’d think it was solid marble from the proposed cost.  If the new police station is any indication, it will be a disappointingly ordinary mix of drywall and drop ceilings for 4x the cost anybody in their right mind would pay as a private citizen.

More broadly, who thinks we need libraries like we used to?  Well, the grey haired boomers in the audience supporting this beast of an idea, is who.  They argue that there are state funds that “will be lost” if we don’t plow ahead with this idea.  Any questioning of either the cost or the need is met with Green meme derision. “You heartless cad!  A library is a self-evident good!”

Oh…it will require another property tax override to burden our already ridiculously high tax rate with another special project…I’m looking at Tennessee and elsewhere.

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