Hating New York

What we can learn from a MAGA obsession

MAGA and MAGA-adjacent types are very good at finding things and people to hate. They hate immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans), LGBTQ people and wokeness. They hate universities and are doing their best to destroy American science. The New York Times reports that they hate Europe. And they very much hate New York City.

OK, I’m not impartial on this issue. I grew up on Long Island and still think of NYC proper as “the city.” I live in Manhattan now, and my experience is that if you can afford housing — which is admittedly a huge problem — it’s actually a very good life, with an incredible range of things to do either in walking distance or a short subway ride away. Not everyone wants to live this way, but nobody is saying they should. All we ask is that some Americans be allowed to have favorable views of a place that provides the advantages density and, yes, diversity can offer.

But that, of course, is exactly what the U.S. right refuses to accept. New York is one of the safest places in America, yet much of the country insists on seeing it as a terrifying urban hellscape. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, insists that everyone is afraid to ride the subway:

If you want people to take the train, to take transit, then make it safe, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it wonderful, don’t make it a shithole.

Indeed, the subway is such an intolerable shithole that more than 4 million people ride it every day, myself among them. To be honest, the subway isn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, and you can’t take it without coming into close contact with people who don’t look like you. But it’s quite safe — more on that in a minute — and it works very well at getting people quickly across the heart of a densely populated city.

As an aside, it’s remarkable that federal officials — who are supposed to work for all of us — feel free to trash-talk major American cities, as long as the cities in question vote Democratic.

But anyway, Duffy is an idiot, so I found it more interesting when Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, who reputedly isn’t an idiot, declared that “We want the U.S. to be more like Florida and less like New York.” I guess that he gets some points for trash-talking the whole state, not just the big city. But still.

What was he going on about? Well, Florida spends considerably less money on government programs and hence manages without an income tax. “And I can tell you having lived in both, it’s better not to have an income tax, and Florida gives better services.”

So is Florida clearly a better place than New York? Let’s look at some numbers:

Sources: Centers for Disease Control, KFF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy

Start at the top. In my opinion, one important aspect of the quality of life is not being dead, and New Yorkers on average live three years longer than Floridians. Life expectancy is even higher, 81.5 years, in New York City.

Why do New Yorkers live longer? One answer is that city life — which involves a lot more walking than suburban life — is generally good for you.

Another is that New Yorkers are considerably less likely than Floridians to be murdered. In my experience many Americans simply refuse to believe that New York in 2025 isn’t what it was in 1975, that it’s actually a low-crime city. But it is.

And New Yorkers are much less likely than most Americans to die in traffic accidents. Why? In the city and surrounding areas, one main answer has to be that so many people take public transit rather than driving.

Which brings us to the whole issue of subway safety. Last year was unusually bad, with ten people murdered on the subway. Some of the murders were gruesome. But bear in mind, again, that 4 million people ride the subway each day — and that in 2023 thirty-four hundred Floridians died in car crashes. Taking the subway is much, much safer than driving.

Some Florida residents may also have died from lack of adequate medical care. Seniors in Florida, as in every state, are covered by Medicare. But Florida has refused to expand Medicaid, and in general New York makes much more effort to ensure coverage. As a result, Floridians under 65 are more than twice as likely as their New York counterparts to lack health insurance.

Of course, when Bessent says that America should be like Florida, he probably isn’t thinking about being unable to afford medical care, an issue that rarely arises for people with a net worth of at least $500 million.

He is, however, thinking about taxes. But here’s the funny thing: for most Floridians, taxes aren’t all that low. The state has a 6 percent sales tax, plus additional sales taxes levied by some local governments, and significant property taxes. The bottom 40 percent of Floridians pay almost exactly the same state and local taxes as a percentage of their income as the bottom 40 percent of New Yorkers.

The difference is at the top, where New Yorkers pay a state income tax plus, if they live in the city, a city income tax on top. So yes, if you’re in the top 1 percent, you pay much lower taxes if you live in Florida.

And these high taxes on the rich must do a lot of damage to New York’s economy, making it much less productive than Florida’s, right? Um. There are multiple reasons New York has such high real GDP per capita, but if taxes are doing a lot of harm you sure can’t see it in the data.

So what’s with Scott Bessent telling the United States to be more like Florida? It’s especially unseemly when he cites his personal experience of living in the two places — after all, he’s in the class that will never need Medicaid, probably never takes public transit, and benefits from Florida’s highly regressive tax system.

If you want to make the case for Florida-type governance, OK. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that what’s good for Scott Bessent is good for America.

MUSICAL CODA