Zohran Mamdani’s socialist tax agenda may look like a New York freak show. It isn’t. It is just the loudest, most cartoonishly self-aware version of a Democratic predatory instinct that has been quietly strip-mining productive citizens for decades - treating them as walking ATMs, then performing theatrical shock when the ATMs grow legs and walk to Florida.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand imagined the builders, investors, and producers withdrawing from a society that mined them while morally sneering at them. You do not have to be a Rand devotee to recognize that same pattern playing out in real time across America’s bluest ZIP codes. In fact, you barely have to read the news.
Mamdani has backed slashing New York’s estate-tax exemption from $7.35 million to $750,000 and raising the top estate-tax rate from 16 percent to 50 percent. He has also called for a 2-point income-tax hike on New Yorkers earning more than $1 million a year. Different tax, same message: success is something to be hunted and caged.
To sell the pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth over $5 million, he filmed a “tax the rich" video outside Ken Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse, turning a private residence into a political prop. Griffin called it “creepy and weird," and Citadel warned that its planned Park Avenue project could be reconsidered. Nothing says “please stop building here" like a stalking socialist mayor using your home as a backdrop for his economically illiterate fever dream of free stuff. The city’s message to high earners is no longer merely “pay more." It is: pay more, shut up, and be grateful we let you remain within reach.
Gov. Kathy Hochul is not far behind, aligned with the pied-à-terre tax projected to raise $500 million annually - the same Hochul who once told conservatives to take a bus to Florida because they were “not New Yorkers." By the time reality arrived, she was wistfully suggesting pilgrimages to Palm Beach to coax back the tax base she had gleefully insulted. New York State’s own migration data show a net outflow of 74,482 individual tax returns from 2022 to 2023. You can only sneer at the geese for so long before noticing the golden eggs have stopped arriving.
But New York, at least, theoretically wants you to stay. Seattle is conducting its fiscal self-destruction with a smile and a farewell wave. Mayor Katie Wilson - self-proclaimed socialist, fresh from defeating an incumbent on a platform that would have made Bernie Sanders blush - was asked at a Seattle University forum about reports that millionaires are fleeing Washington state. Her response, delivered with a laugh and a dismissive hand gesture: “The ones that leave, like, bye." The clip went viral, viewed over four million times, and the reaction was instant. “We’re doomed," wrote commentator Brandi Kruse. “Seattle is extra cooked," added comedian Tim Young. The Washington State Republican Party suggested perhaps the mayor herself should be the one to leave.
They were not wrong. Within weeks, the real-world consequences of Mayor Wilson’s breezy philosophy arrived on schedule. Starbucks - born in Seattle, nurtured in Seattle, synonymous with Seattle - announced it was laying off 61 workers at its city headquarters while shifting hundreds of corporate roles to Nashville, Tennessee.
Former CEO Howard Schultz, who himself departed Washington state for Florida after nearly five decades, did not mince words in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: Seattle’s mayor, he wrote, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner, and her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers even while she depends on them for revenue. He described a city and state where public safety, fiscal stability, and economic vitality are deteriorating simultaneously - where declining foot traffic weakens small businesses, employment falls, revenue shrinks, services erode, and confidence evaporates. “Cities and states don’t decline overnight," Schultz observed. “They drift."
They are drifting fast. Jon Bodwell, whose family founded Delta Camshaft in Washington in 1977, is packing up after 48 years and leaving. Not because he wants to. Because he has no choice. His insurance jumped 20 percent. His power bill nearly doubled in a single month. Graffiti is relentless, crime is rampant, and police officers have told him it takes longer to write an arrest report than to actually make an arrest - so they often don’t bother. “The criminals basically have more protective rights than I do as the building owner," Bodwell said. He is 56, in poor health, and powerless to stop what is happening. His move will cost him upwards of $100,000.
“A few years ago, I should have sold," he said. “Now there’s just a ton of buildings for sale because everyone’s leaving." He represents something the tax-the-rich crowd never considers: not a billionaire, not a hedgie, not a Ken Griffin. Just a family business, built over a lifetime, ground into rubble by an ideology that confuses punishing success with creating it.
He is not alone. A survey by the Association of Washington Business found that 44 percent of business leaders are considering moving their personal residence out of state, and that businesses are now more than twice as likely to expand outside Washington as within it. The state’s new 9.9 percent income tax on households earning over $1 million - Washington’s first-ever income tax - was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson in March. The progressives cheered. The productive are calculating moving costs.
Seattle’s own mayor sophomorically waves goodbye. The question no one in her administration appears capable of asking is: goodbye to what, exactly? Goodbye to the corporate tax base that funds the schools. Goodbye to the small manufacturers who employ the plumbers and machinists. Goodbye to the entrepreneurs who would have been the next Starbucks, had they not taken one look at the regulatory environment and the crime statistics and chosen Austin instead.
The pattern is not subtle. Identify wealth. Moralize against its creators. Milk them. Then get bewildered and outraged when the unpatriotic cows relocate to Florida.
California performs the same ritual with better hair and worse self-awareness. Gavin Newsom has presided over the nation’s highest top personal income-tax rate, treats capital gains as ordinary income, and has built a fiscal architecture entirely dependent on the market-driven income of a thin stratum of high earners. The result: chronic multiyear deficits, a parade of departing corporate headquarters, and a population exodus that has cost the state a congressional seat.
Now California is seriously advancing a billionaire wealth tax - not on income, not on gains realized, but on net worth itself, reaching beyond state lines to pursue former residents who had the audacity to leave. This is not tax policy. It is a fiscal mugging conducted at the state line with a speed camera and a court order, calibrated to make departure itself expensive enough to deter. The smart money is already calculating how many years of residency trigger the exit tax. The even smarter money left before the calculation was necessary.
Illinois, under J.B. Pritzker, is marginally less baroque in its ambitions but identical in its instincts. Voters rejected his graduated income-tax scheme at the ballot box, but the appetite for extraction survived the democratic verdict. This year’s $56 billion budget leans on new taxes and fees, including a proposed social-media tax. Different accent, same script: spend beyond reason, hunt more revenue cows, milk them harder, wonder why herd numbers keep declining.
A state cannot sustain prosperity while converting achievement into a liability. It cannot keep raising claims on those most capable of building, investing, and hiring, then act surprised when those people arrange their affairs in Texas, Tennessee, or Florida. Mamdani may be the most shameless expression of this exodus-inducing pathology, but New York, California, Illinois, and Washington State have been governed by versions of it for years. The productive are no longer treated as citizens whose confidence must be earned and protected. They are treated as repositories of extractable surplus - to be harvested until they are not.
And when they leave? The muggers do not reconsider the mugging. They demand the victim come back for one more shakedown.
That is why Atlas is getting mugged in America’s bluest states - and why, when he finally shrugs and walks away, the politicians rifling through his pockets are so busy grabbing what they can that they never notice he is turning cyanotic blue under the crushing weight of their incompetence.
The wave and the laugh are the tell. When Seattle’s mayor says “bye" to the millionaires, and chuckles self-consciously at the crowd's adoration, she is not demonstrating strength. She is demonstrating that she has no idea what is about to hit her budget - or her city.
Atlas doesn’t write memos when he leaves. He just goes.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage therapist, trainer of therapists, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as a MDA medic, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His articles have appeared in Israel National News, Jewish News Syndicate, The Jerusalem Post, Breitbart and elsewhere.