From the Daily Mail:

Cuomo begs wealthy New Yorkers to come back to save the city and pleads ‘I’ll buy you a drink!’ as he fights off calls to raise their taxes – which he fears may scare them away forever

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is begging wealthy New Yorkers to return to the city to save it from economic ruin while fighting off calls from other lawmakers to raise their taxes – a move he fears could permanently drive the top 1 percent out of the city.

Thousands of New York City residents fled Manhattan and Brooklyn earlier this year when the city was the COVID-19 epicenter of the world.

Now they are looking at what is happening to New York City and they are wondering why they should return to that post-apocalyptic shithole.

At a press conference on Monday, he said of the wealthiest residents who have long left the city: ‘I literally talk to people all day long who are in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, “You gotta come back, when are you coming back?”

“‘We’ll go to dinner, I’ll buy you a drink. Come over, I’ll cook.”

What pathetic groveling.  Absolutely pathetic.

‘They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? If I stay there, I pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge,’ he said.

No shit.

What is making matters worse are the increasing calls from other lawmakers to boost taxes on the city’s highest earners to try to plug the $30billion deficit that was left by the pandemic.

Cuomo said he is resisting the idea, that will send the already transient group of taxpayers running for the hills.

‘A single per cent of New York’s population pays half of the state’s taxes and they’re the most mobile people on the globe,’ he said.

Cuomo is just figuring this out?

This next part is icing on the schadenfreude cake.

New York’s wealthy Upper East Side reports a shocking 286% increase in robberies – with armed gunmen holding up residents just feet from the homes of billionaires

New York City’s wealthiest neighborhood is grappling with a spike in armed robberies, new data reveals.

Alarmingly, a significant number of those have involved locals being held up at gunpoint.

For the entirety of 2019, the Upper East Side only reported four armed robberies. This year, 14 have already been reported.

The figures are causing alarm in the ritzy neighborhood, where residents boast an average annual income of $322,400.

With no cops around, the criminals have gotten bolder.  They are not stupid, it doesn’t net you anything to rob some working-class guy who may have $2 in his wallet.  If you are going to risk jail time for pulling a gun in a mugging, might a well try and mug some bank exec with a wallet full of hedge fund cash?

I’ll tell you exactly what this is, the Greek epic tragedy like collapse of the hubris of New York City.  In Greek tragedies, the more hubris the protagonist had, the harder he fell.

New Yorkers always believed that New York City was the center of the universe.  People wanted to live in New York City because it was New York City.  How could the rich want to live anywhere else when they had the Met on one side, the Guggenheim on the other, Broadway within walking distance, and so and so forth.

You could tax them, regulate them, abuse them with government, and they might complain, but they would never leave New York City, the greatest city on earth.

Then these people fled because of the virus.  Now, after hiding out in Miami for four months, they discovered that the shopping at Bal Harbor is better, the restaurants are just as good, and Florida has no income tax.  Then the realized that they haven’t actually been to the Met or Guggenheim or Broadway in years and suddenly paying a whopping shit-load of money just to be able to brag about living next to one of these places wasn’t worth the cost.

Lastly, the riots in New York City and the lack of riots in Miami really drove the point home that there is no reason to go back to New York City.

Who wants to return home to this:

Fifth Avenue, New York City.
Don’t vote for Democrats.
https://t.co/LMIBqDyL8j

— 𝕞𝕖𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕤𝕒 🙈🙉🙊 (@my3monkees) June 5, 2020

All of a sudden, the great hubris of New York City catches up with itself and the tax base of the city comes crashing down in utter destruction.

He wants the federal government to step in with help in the final stimulus bill that is due to pass soon, and has warned that unless more financial aid is given, the country is on track for a ‘real recession’. 

‘If they don’t make this bill right, frankly, they shouldn’t pass it because it will be the last bill. 

‘If this bill does not have funding for state and local government you will see a real recession, not just in New York but across the country [by] forcing state and local governments to lay off people,’ he said. 

No, fuck Cuomo.  I’m not baling out New York for its shitty decisions.

America will survive New York City turning into Detroit.

Other port cities will pick up the traffic not going into New York.   Banking, which is already decentralizing because of the internet, will accelerate its decentralization efforts so that bankers can work from anywhere over the internet seamlessly and not have to pay for expensive NYC real estate.

With the popularity of Hamilton on Disney+, more live productions will go online or live broadcast into movie theaters.  There is more money to be made showing a show to tens of millions of people for the cost of a streaming service than a limited number of people who can afford ridiculous ticket prices.

The financially viable aspects of NYC will diffuse out to other cities and what will be left is the garbage that can’t escape and isn’t worth moving.

Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio will go down in history as the duo that killed New York City.