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New York is losing population, losing jobs and losing ground to the rest of the country — and its leaders just don’t seem to care.
Start with last week’s news that banking giant JPMorgan Chase now employs more workers in Texas than in New York City; indeed the Lone Star State now has more bank employees than Gotham, period.
Partnership for New York City chief Kathy Wylde is badly understating things when she calls this news “scary.”
Plenty of other finance jobs have flown to Florida, North Carolina and other states; the day grows ever closer when the Big Apple, once the unrivaled financial services capital of America and the world, will become a finance backwater.
The long trend predates COVID and even 9/11; ever since the early 1960s, the city and state have been piling on new taxes, among a host of other sins of omission and commission that make New York City ever-less affordable and livable.
Even the gains of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years only slowed Gotham’s loss of ground relative to other parts of the nation.
And now the decline is starting to accelerate again: The city’s financial-services sector shrank by 8,400 jobs from January through August of this year, after adding 6,400 in the same time period in 2024.
Despite that, the industry is by far the most crucial single part of the entire tri-state economy; easily the top source of tax revenue for both the city and state.
Indeed, local government is more dependent on Wall Street than ever — because other industries have already fled more completely.
Consider: 128 Fortune 500 firms had their headquarters in New York in 1965; today it’s down to about 50 — Texas beats us with 54, and even Florida has 22.
Yet the state government is ever-more hostile to business of all kinds, and the city’s on the verge of making a socialist its next mayor.
Two years back, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange to promote an index that tracks the stocks of Texas companies; visiting with The Post Editorial Board on that trip, he celebrated his state’s zero personal and corporate income-tax rates, as well as its “reasonable and predictable” regulatory environment.
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Gov. Kathy Hochul’s response to Gov. Abbott’s Wall Street foray? “Let me be clear: I will not be taking advice from Greg Abbott,” she huffed.
OK: Hochul actually said that in response to Abbott’s advice on dealing with the migrant crisis at the time . . . but her actions then and since show every bit as much contempt for the Texas gov’s economic-development approach.
For all her talk about making the Empire State more business-friendly, she’s barely been able to fend off the Legislature’s demands for major tax hikes — demands sure to grow as the state faces huge budget holes starting next year.
Yet the simply truth is that New York state needs to start slashing tax rates to remain competitive, whatever the cuts in state spending that requires.
And it needs more than the hesitant retreat Hochul’s so far hinted at from its impossible “climate” ambitions: Give up on the magical thinking about windmills and solar farms; start embracing natural gas — not just new pipelines and new residential and commercial hookups, but fracking too.
Heck, Hochul just sent another terrible signal by endorsing Zohran Mamdani — and thereby making it harder to resist his socialist agenda in the likely event he becomes the next mayor.
Mamdani disdains billionaires and vows to hike taxes on corporations, high earners and “richer white neighborhoods”; his “affordability” agenda is all about slamming the private sector.
Defeating him in November would be a great start on putting New York back on the path of business-friendly growth; if the state doesn’t start reversing course soon, it won’t be long before the slow exodus becomes a stampede for the exits.