Escape from New York

I have appropriated the name of a 1981 Kurt Russell movie as the title of this article. New York City isn’t quite as Snake Plissken (Russell) faced in this science-fiction movie, but on November 4, 2025, New York City voters took the first step to turn the Big Apple into that fictional rotten apple hellhole.

Even before the election of Mamdani, people saw the rot starting to happen in New York City almost the minute Joe Biden was installed in the White House.

Millionaires began the escape from New York City and that evacuation continued accelerating until Donald Trump was elected for his second term. The escaping slowed down a bit, but by then major Wall Street financial institutions had started moving operations to more business-friendly states leaving a token presence in the Big Apple. An organization I am a member of terminated our corporate entity in New York and reestablished it as a Texas corporation when New York rules just became too onerous.

"When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither." ~ Thomas Jefferson

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” ~ Unknown

Mamdani has over promised on issues he knew were out of his control. Marxism 101: any means to an end. Lying is a means to an end if the end is to get elected to public office. Mamdani and other Democrat Socialists of America funding his campaign knew they just needed to fool voters until November 4, 2025.

"It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail." ~ Samuel Adams

However, since the Democratic Socialist Mamdani announced his candidacy and his intent to raise taxes on the millionaires and billionaires and freeze rents, these targets have accelerated their escape from New York movement. The useful idiots that voted for Mamdani are ignorant of the reality that most millionaires and billionaires are actually corporations that fund their retirement plans, 401Ks, and provide jobs.

Corporations are not real live people. When these millionaires and billionaires leave town, they take thousands of jobs with them. Mamdani doesn’t understand history, when taxes rate go up, tax revenues go down, and when tax rates go down, tax revenues go up. This makes no sense whatsoever to a tax and spend socialist.

Mamdani has also promised city run grocery stores providing low-cost food. He might pull this off for a while. However, do an internet search for what government run food stores looked like in the old Soviet Union (i.e., socialist run grocery stores). Food might have been cheap, but selection sucked big time, when there was actually food on the shelves. Unlike the old Soviet Union where the government could force farmers to provide food, Mamdani has no such power. The only food that will be available to him is stuff nobody else wants. So, good luck with that.

"Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep." ~ Alexander Hamilton

Then in 1996, movie character Snake Plissken was called upon again in the movie Escape from Los Angeles. We have been watching the same fleeing population happening in Los Angeles and California, as now in New York, for years. With the latest Democratic Socialist move of Gavin Newsom, it seems all of California has been Mamdani-ized. I think it is safe to assume that escape from California will accelerate in the coming months. The Democratic Socialist, Gavin Newsom, seems to think his Proposition 50 trick will work, and in 2026 it just might work.

However, the California escapees and the deportation of illegal aliens from California is likely to cost California five or more fewer Congressional House seats by the 2030 Census. But, then again, long-term common-sense and planning are not Newsom’s long suit. 

Since the turn of the century, Florida has replaced New York as the third most populous state, Illinois has moved from 5^th to 6^th most populous state, and Michigan has moved from 8^th to 10^th. We can also see that Texas is rapidly gaining on California as the first most populous state. Congressional House seats are fleeing from Democrat Socialist states to Republican states where common sense and liberty prevail. There is a message there for the socialists.

Republican leadership in these deep blue states and cities would like their voters to fight and defeat the socialist scourge. As laudable as that is, but as in any war there is a time to retreat and dig in where conditions are more in your favor. The left coast, the northeast right coast, and Illinois are not those places until after they completely fail.

There is a common denominator in the shift in population, people are running away from “blue” boss controlled jurisdictions to places where freedom still rings. The socialist Democrats are winning battles, but they are losing the war because people (House seats) and businesses (capital) are voting with their feet.

"Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains, its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it." ~ Abraham Lincoln