Bolting De Blasio: The Exodus Begins

And so it begins: De Blasio’s war on the producers has triggered a mass exodus form the city. 5,000 very wealthy families paid 30 percent of the city’s income tax. Losing even a few of them means significantly less money for filling potholes and hiring cops. That’s who this clown is attacking?

De Blasio is making good on his campaign platform — destroying the producer and greasing the grubby hooves of the moochers and the looters. Revenge of the loser.

But it’s not just the wealthy. Yesterday, I posted on the latest attack by Red Bill, closing the best-performing charter schools in the city as payback to the teacher’s union. Targeting the poor for his sleazy backroom deals.

Props to Governor Andrew Cuomo and Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos, who today came to the rescue of these poor families by promising to step in to pay the rent of city charter schools denied free space under a crackdown by Mayor De Blasio, according to two sources.

“De Blasio’s anti-rich policies are driving wealthy people out of NYC,” NY Post, March 4, 2014

Money — it’s the root of all evil. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Or at least an unfair advantage.

That’s the gist of the liberals’ creed and justification for their war on wealth. The other half of their view holds that the poor are innocent victims of life’s rigged game.

Their narrative of evil winners and noble losers clears the way for self-heroic redeemers. They will deliver social justice by meting out punishment and spreading the wealth around. Their virtue entitles them to power.

It sounds like a comic-book view of life, but it’s the reality of liberalism today. And thanks to the de Blasio administration, New Yorkers are getting a bitter taste of its divisive nature. So much so that talk about quitting Gotham is surging in some circles.

One friend says 10 wealthy people have told him they are leaving and another says disgusted New Yorkers bought $1 billion in residential property in Florida since the November election. The Sunshine State confers an automatic tax cut of about 12 percent because it has no city or state income tax, nor does it have an inheritance tax.

Beyond taxes, the mayor’s open hostility is a factor. His insulting treatment of former Mayor Bloomberg at the inauguration remains a cloud over him. As one affluent woman, a self-described liberal, told me, “De Blasio hates me, so I hate him.” She doesn’t personally know him, but draws her conclusion from his words and deeds.

The central problem is the mayor’s childish view of wealth.

Taking a page out of Barack Obama’s playbook, de Blasio casts his push for a tax hike on those earning over $500,000 as a moral imperative.

“I believe it’s time to ask the wealthy to do a little more,” he said last year. He paints taxes as a matter of giving back, as though the money was taken from others.

The sneering suggestion that everyone with money is somehow guilty of something is not a surprise coming from a man who spent his honeymoon on an illegal trip to Castro’s Cuba. What is a surprise is his lack of appreciation for the impact of wealth on city revenues and the importance of philanthropy to the arts and education.

As Bloomberg often noted, about 5,000 very wealthy families paid 30 percent of the city’s income tax. Losing even a few of them means significantly less money for filling potholes and hiring cops.

Billions in philanthropy support the arts, ranging from local dance groups to the flagship institutions that define New York as a world-class city. Nearly half of the Metropolitan Opera’s operating fund comes from donations, which last year reached $143 million.

The biggest change in the Bloomberg era was an explosion of charitable dollars to help fund the charter-school movement, and that seems to infuriate de Blasio. One reason might be that it threatens his political base. Charters teach 70,000 kids, and if they keep expanding and succeeding, they will be an existential threat to the unions that back him.