The rich shouldn’t feel like the enemy’: Is New York turning on the wealthy?

> it’s more dangerous than ever (while I lived here)

I agree that QoL in NYC is awful, but it's not "more dangerous than ever". Like in every other US city, the crime rate is near an all-time low[1]. Murders spiked during Covid, but they're still low compared to previous decades.

> Add to that the “you’re not paying you’re fair share attitude” which I’m definitely getting

Where do you get this attitude? I have never experienced that in the city.

In fact, it's one of the places where the rich seem to be the least scrutinized, because most of them pay lip service to liberal values while still being 100,000x richer than a middle-class person living a few neighborhoods away.

1. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/07/giulianis-misleading-attac...

As someone who is “tech salary rich” (so, “rich” without quotes to most New Yorkers) but not “VC rich”, I don’t really relate to this comment. The MTA’s decline is largely caused by it weirdly being run by the state rather than the city, and constant bickering between Cuomo and de Blasio (which has caused lots of other problems, too). Homelessness is an issue, but high income people also very aggressively resist sheltering people in their neighborhoods [1]. And while murders rose last year (as they did in most US cities) crime in NYC has been steadily falling for decades.

[1] https://www.curbed.com/2020/11/upper-west-side-homeless-hote...

This story has been told a thousand times. It was an annual tradition for Bear Sterns to threaten to leave the city over taxes. They went out of business before they could do it.

If you've been here 18 years, crime is still way below what it was when you arrived. We're at about the level we were 10 years ago. Not great but not the worst we've seen. I've been here since the 90s and it was pretty bonkers then but people flooded in anyway.

Also I'm hoping this tax rise is a prelude to statewide single-payer healthcare which is also on the legislative agenda. You can move your business to Florida or Texas and you'll be sending your tax dollars to Covid-deniers and insurrectionists.

You know that the homicide rate in all the large cities in both Florida and Texas is double, triple, or quadruple what it is in NYC, right? Similar with property crime (except Tampa and El Paso).

> Add to that the “you’re not paying you’re fair share attitude”

Funnily enough, "fair" is often subjective.

Consider this article: https://www.thejournal.ie/guess-how-many-irish-tax-exiles-ha...

that quotes "refusing to pay tax like ordinary citizens" - yet the tax they are not paying is explicitly not one that ordinary citizens pay in the first place.

The truth is some places behave like anyone with money obtained that money only with assistance from their place of residence, when a lot of the time the assistance was minimal. When people relocate, this proves that point, but it's a shame it has to be that way.

Tangential, but it's fascinating to me how different people's preferences can be. Every time I'm in NYC I feel like I'm going to go crazy if I stay more than a couple of days because of how dense and artificial it is (concrete, metal, etc). I hope people flock back to cities if the pandemic ever ends so that countryside prices can go down and I can find a place to be away from humans and around trees and animals

> Add to that the “you’re not paying you’re fair share attitude” which I’m definitely getting... there are days I feel like I should move our company to Florida or Texas. I can’t see myself living in a city that isn’t happy to have me.

Hidden within this comment (in my reading) is the implicit assumption that you are paying your fair share. How exactly are you calculating this?

Grass is always greener, man. My wife is from New York and every now and then I try to convince her we should move back there. Concern about finding a job is always her worry, but I think she vastly underestimates herself.

I've been in Texas over a decade now and presently live in Dallas. The homelessness problem is just as bad. Train infrastructure is probably worse consider there are only five lines in the entire city, and the interiors often have puke and shit all over the seats. Combine above ground power lines with constant high winds and we get power outages probably once a week, at least once a month. The city never fixes sidewalks or potholes. A quarter inch of rain results in half the traffic lights going out. I live within spitting distance of AT&T world headquarters and still can't broadband service from anyone but Spectrum, which is terrible (they once shut down my service and terminated my account because someone else gave them the wrong address and claimed to be moving into my house). Code inspectors literally sleep on the job and shoddy contractors and builders are all over the place, so you need to be extremely careful shopping for a place to live and you can expect to be making some extremely expensive repairs and upgrades within a few years of moving in, somewhat negating the advantage of lower purchase price.

It's a bit of a cultural wasteland, too, which many people won't care about, but if you're from New York, you're probably going to miss it. Dallas is thankfully pretty good for live music if you're into 70s through 90s era punk/metal/industrial type stuff, which thankfully I am, but if you're more artsy, well, the city tried to build an arts district after losing out on Boeing headquarters 20 years ago supposedly because executives wives didn't want to live in a city with no culture, but I can't say it worked out well.

Space is the saving grace. The one thing I still love about this city compared to New York is I've got a downtown townhouse five times the interior floor area as my sister-in-law in Queens at about a quarter the price of her place. But again, we've also sunk a ton of money into fixing nonsense poor craftsmanship that would have never gotten past a city that does real building inspection. My neighbor successfully sued the city for his furnace being installed upside down because the inspector was 84 and he was somehow able to prove the guy was unwilling to walk up the stairs to actually look at what he was signing off on.

I'm not trying to say it's terrible here or anything or that New York is paradise (which I wouldn't know anyway since I've only visited and never lived there). Just beware. Low taxes aren't the end all be all of life. The government still manages to be terrible in a lot of other ways besides, largely with horrible infrastructure and no maintenance, but also in smaller ways like selling your information when you register to vote or get a driver's license, making it effectively impossible to not be slammed with nonstop spam no matter how careful you otherwise are about privacy hygiene.

NY should rescind the Stock Transfer tax rebates. They are losing out on ~$16 billion in tax revenue annually.

You'll just create a self fulfilling prophecy with that mindset. Why would the rich be prosocial if they're treated as antisocial regardless. They might as well behave nefariously and reap those rewards if people are going to treat them as an increased liability.

Does physical violence not exist in your worldview?

>Didn't they learn their lesson from the Silicon Valley exodus?

The people spamming the "raise taxes" button have seen the seeds of their ideology spread far and wide with the "silicon valley exodus". In light of that, why would they stop?

Which history book? Many history books would tell us that high levels of income and wealth inequality lead to social unrest (French Revolution, for instance).

In my view, taxation comes down to a judgment of "fairness" and this is very hard to agree upon. Given the rise of COVID, it's even harder to fairly allocate the more limited revenues in big cities now.

Interesting quote from the article: "The top 0.05 per cent of earners — just 1,786 filers — accounted for 16 per cent of its income tax revenues in 2018"

Does this not accurately reflect the real distribution of wealth, or in fact reflect it regressively (i.e. that distressingly small number of people are paying proportionately less than other citizens, they are just that astronomically wealthy)?

Can't get blood from a stone. The reason tax revenue comes from a small % of people is because those are the ones who've got all the money.

NY should rescind the Stock Transfer tax rebates. They are losing out on ~$16 billion in tax revenue annually.

But that is the crux of the issue. Wealth is political power. The only way to mitigate wealth's influence on political institutions requires drastic, systemic changes. The wealthy can be as well meaning as they want, but no individual should control that many resources in a democratic society.

Which is what Financial Times does, publishing articles about "whiteness" while defending the rich.

There is certainly an entrenchment of an American and global oligarchy. What oligarchs historically fear the most is growing resentment among the masses, whether justified or not (i.e., disliking rampant exploitative practices like usury vs. your run-of-the-mill envy). When that happens, distraction, _unwarranted_ suspicion, and confusion are excellent tools. Distraction and _baseless_ suspicion can refocus resentment by whipping up conflicts among the masses themselves. This has the secondary benefit of dividing the masses and rendering them harmless. Confusion about basic facts and weakening the level-headed exercise of reason can render people blind, inert, and ineffectual, often producing self-absorption. There are lot of ways to do this. Pornography ("sexual liberation as political control"), fear mongering, racial conflict, prurient and stupefying film, sensationalist news. Even COVID, which is very much a real virus, became an instrument of political control (the senseless prolonging of undiscriminating lockdowns and social distancing limits social contact and communication). Censorship is another symptom because if you censor discussion that says too much, again, a dangerous consensus might result that will destabilize the status quo that those in power rely on.

But such tactics don't last. Either the society in question self-destructs because such a state of affairs is never sustainable, or people realize what's being done anyway. This is a dangerous situation to be in. Those in power rarely wish to change, and the mob can itself impose the most terrifying tyranny.

All this would explain the emerging interest in socialism. Ties between private interests and government are extremely fuzzy, with revolving doors between industries like Big Tech and Washington. Growing resentment among the masses poses a threat. Socialism would seem to both secure oligarchic power by completing the merger of corporate interest and government while also pacifying the resentment of the mob with state-funded services and UBI or whatever else. Not all oligarchs agree on the precise means, which is where power struggles can come into play, but the general trajectory is thus.

For the not so wealthy.

Low tax places are not "hellholes" despite your insults. They might have slightly less services, but in return you pay a lot less for them. The trade off is easy to make, particularly if most of the missing services are ones you don't personally use much.

The rich are already contributing a significant percentage of the city's revenue. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26710993

In my opinion, you can't ask them for more. If they are able to move to Florida and still run their business, then the value of their business is not derived from NY but rather from external sources. In this case, these are people bringing wealth from outside to the city.

The problem, probably, is mismanagement of the raised revenue. If it is too much money, there will be lots of predators. Sometimes you have to burn everything to realize what you had and start from the ground. People (rich or poor) clearly like NYC more than Miami but it seems with the current governance, the city has to reset itself every once in a while.

Tax revenue has outpaced median wages by a long shot. I'm not sure I can relate to the argument that increased taxes is what is needed to close the wage gap as the tax collector's have done nothing to prove they will do any better than the rich at distributing wealth.

"Low tax hellholes"? As opposed to high tax ones? Have you even been to Miami?

> It would be great news to New Yorkers since decreased demand from the rich would start making the city livable

What kind of demands from the rich do the think affect "livability"? To give two examples - homelessness and the poor state of the MTA - how will fewer rich people help there?

Just an anecdotal...

Here in utah we have water shortages and major droughts.

Politicians like the governor plead with us to "watch our water" while not doing anything about industrial use of water.

Now for statistics... All private use of water in the state amounts to under 3% total. Meaning: If everybody in the state took one shower per year it'd do diddly for the water shortages/droughts.

Because industry is still using the bulk by a shit-ton.

It's all posturing to make us "feel good" that we're "helping" but it doesn't do anything. My yearly household amount of water is something like 0.016% of state use..or maybe it's 0.0016... I read the statistic somewhere else, but it's not even worth doing anything because it won't move the needle one iota.

I personally have an abhorrence towards all politicians, at least the ones who take money from special interests and corporations (so 95% of politicians).

In Germany, you'd be paying 42%. You'd get subways, a national rail system, universal healthcare, and college would be free. America doesn't have a "spending" problem, it has a history of mal-investment and neglect. But those F-35s. And nukes! Enough to wipe out most of humanity.

That's a way lower effective rate than ordinary people pay.

It turned out that camping out in a public square is not an effective method of forcing change, since it is possible to just ignore you. Then after the hype died down and as people got sick of the more negative aspects the movement bled to death and the actual "occupation" was eventually cleared by the police.

Obama squashed it.

Identity politics

Because:

1. 1% Michael Bloomberg billionaire decided it wasn't convenient anymore and sent in the cops to beat heads to clear them out.

2. Vague movements rarely are organized enough to have clear goals, a clear plan to get there, and sustain interest, attention, and involvement to achieve them. You don't ask billionaires for a donation because they'll never give more than a dollar. And you don't camp-out at their offices because they control the cops, the government, and it looks weak. Once the physical presences of OM were lost, the community, social, and political bonds were severed because the people weren't serious and committed to seeing real change through; instead, they treated it like a Wall St. Woodstock.

If citizens were serious about recouping loot stolen from working people, there are only two things billionaires understand: money and survival. If a movement can't effectively threaten either of those, then they are irrelevant. This dynamic of under-regulated capitalism is the fault of the billionaires, and how their grotesque greed snatched defeat from the jaws of obscene success and just handed it over to likely rapid upheaval and an unproven, alternative system.

> How does someone become a billionaire?

Typically billionaires become billionaires by gambling other peoples money and winning

"Most fortunes were made in the staid finance and investments industry...Notable finance and investing list members include Warren Buffett, the third richest person in the world and Robert Smith, the founder of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners...It turns out managing or investing other people’s money can make you rich"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2019/03/09/how-the...