New York City’s business leaders are threatening Governor Andrew Cuomo with a mass exodus should the state impose the billionaire’s tax on the wealthy.
Manhattan’s biggest employers — including Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone Group — have sent a letter to Cuomo stating that New York has all the revenue it needs from President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to make the city whole and any additional taxes will send these high-power businesses packing.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, these Manhattan businesses do not need to be in The Big Apple since they all have thrived during the last year. The signers of this letter stated that they discovered that their workers do not need to be in their high-rise Manhattan offices to do their job well. Zoom takes care of that.
The tax-threat letter was signed by CEOs who employ more than 1.5 million people in Manhattan and these workers should be considered essential if Manhattan is ever going to come back to its former self.
Albany is looking to add roughly $7 billion in new taxes on the wealthiest despite the federal stimulus bill making the state whole after two years of budget deficits.
“For better or worse, the pandemic has demonstrated that our workforce is more mobile than we ever imagined,” the letter stated.
“Our businesses are committed to maintaining a strong presence in New York, but currently only about 10 percent of our colleagues are in the office and prospects for the future of a dense urban workplace are uncertain,” the signers wrote.
The CEOs cited that many executives have already left Mew York City and “have resettled their families in other locations, generally with far lower taxes than New York, and the proposed tax increases will make it harder to get them to return.This is not about companies threatening to leave the state; this is simply about our people voting with their feet,” the letter noted.
The letter was initiated by the pro-business group Partnership for New York City and signed by 250 business leaders.
If you walk around Manhattan today, then you will see that this letter is not a threat, it is the reality of what Midtown could be for the next decade should these execs go through with the threat.