Cuomo Courts the 1 Percent

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, August 05, 2020

 

It has been gratifying to watch Andrew Cuomo slowly explore in public the deficiencies of his own political school, for example in his ongoing agony over the limitations of a steeply progressive tax code. With New York City’s wealthiest residents seeking safe haven from the coronavirus epidemic and from the Bill de Blasio–enabled crime epidemic, Cuomo is begging them to return.

 

Why?

 

“A single percent of New York’s population pays half of the state’s taxes, and they’re the most mobile people on the globe,” he says.

 

A generation ago, if you were in finance, media, publishing, fashion, or advertising, you pretty much had to have a New York City presence if you had large ambitions. That is no longer the case. People returned to New York City in the Giuliani era and after not because there were no jobs or opportunity to be found elsewhere but because it had become a good place to live. And if you were one of those 1-percenters who pay most of the taxes, New York was worth the surcharge.

 

But that was a reasonably safe, clean, and orderly New York with a functioning subway system. Bill de Blasio’s New York is a different kind of New York, and, for many of those “most mobile people on the globe,” it is not worth the surcharge.

 

There are many nice places to live, especially if you are wealthy, and for that reason New York needs the billionaires more than the billionaires need New York. Conservatives who want to make a case for a reforming approach to municipal governance have a great opportunity before them. But this is not a problem that is going to be solved by cutting taxes — heavy taxes are a burden, but New York’s most pressing problems are public health and public hygiene, crime, transit, education, and housing. With the exception of crime and school choice, conservatives generally do not speak very convincingly about those issues.

 

But if the deficiencies of the so-called blue-state model are penetrating even the once-impregnable fortress of Andrew Cuomo’s skull, it is not impossible to communicate them to the city’s business community, to its civic leaders, and to a meaningful portion of ordinary New Yorkers, too.