(Daily Signal)—New York isn’t going to be able to tax and spend its way out of this mess.
A series of recently released reports highlights how the state of New York has put itself on a long-term path toward calamity.
New York is caught in the same doom loop that’s entrapped California and other big, blue states that have squandered their wealth while setting themselves up for a future of decline and mass departures.
On Monday, the New York Post reported on research done by the Citizens Budget Committee that found that New York has seen an exodus of millionaires over the last decade. In fact, no state has seen such a decline since 2010.
“The state went from having 12.7% of all millionaires in the nation to 8.7%,” the Post reported.
Now, the more dimwitted leftists may take this moment to celebrate this as a win for equality as they tell the departing rich, “Bye, bye! Teehee.” But those with a room-temperature IQ will understand that this has created quite a dilemma for their entire political project.
“New York’s declining share of high-income taxpayers has meaningful consequences,” the Citizens Budget Committee report noted. “Had New York maintained its share of the nation’s millionaires over the past decade, personal income tax collections would have been substantially higher – roughly $10.7 billion more in tax year 2022.”
The findings of the report account for data up to 2022, but there’s little sign that the taxpayer exodus has abated.
You can see why New York’s Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul suddenly changed her tune about constituents fleeing her governance and started begging rich Floridians to come back to be taxed.
I don’t think I have to tell the ex-New Yorkers sipping their pina coladas by the beach to ignore Hochul’s request.
When asked about the report’s findings, all she could come up with was blaming President Donald Trump and Republicans for reducing state and local tax deductions as if it’s the federal government’s responsibility to protect states like New York from their own bad decisions.
Funny enough, while Hochul is blaming Trump for her troubles and asking for wealthy taxpayers to return, she’s actively driving off potential tax revenue from elsewhere. On Tuesday, she announced that the state is putting a moratorium on data centers.
Now these data centers may be annoying to locals—most Americans dislike them—but they do represent a potentially huge amount of lost revenue for the state. Trump called them “money machines” in a Truth Social post on Wednesday.
Can New York really afford to drive them away now?
The reason energy costs are so high in places like New York isn’t the data centers; it’s mostly due to climate regulations and other self-destructive policies. It doesn’t seem like they are in a hurry to fix that issue any time soon.
In fact, on the kooky climate policies front, things look to be getting a lot worse soon as the state scrambles to comply with the 2019 climate mandate law.
New York’s dysfunction goes beyond losing millionaires and now data centers. It is bleeding middle-class residents and adding more people at the lowest end of the income spectrum, too.
A separate report by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli painted a fuller picture of what’s happening in New York. The most worrying population collapse isn’t happening among millionaires, it’s the departure of middle- and upper-middle-income families.
The report noted found that in 2024 there was “net out-migration of 13,662 taxpayers—a loss of approximately 1 in 1,000 resident taxpayers” and that outmigration was disproportionately “married households with incomes between $100,000 and $500,000.”
“On a net basis, almost 8,200 such [tax] filers moved out of New York in 2024, 0.7% of resident taxpayers in that category,” DiNapoli wrote. “The highest out-migration rates are for households making $500,000 or more – 1% of these taxpayers left the state in 2024.”
Not great.
And on top of New York’s growing list of financial problems is the fact that New York City, which drives large parts of the state’s economy, decided to elect socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani. That’s another nasty side effect of losing families and replacing them with overly educated, under-employed transient singles with a passion for wearing keffiyehs, dying their hair blue, and socialism.
The city has dug itself into a hole and is now attempting to see if that hole goes all the way to China.
Meanwhile, Mamdani’s done everything short of putting up signs outside city limits saying to businesses and the wealthy, “Don’t come here or we’ll eat you.”
New York City can carry on like this for a little while, but at some point, the budget gimmicks won’t work, there will be no juice to be squeezed, and they’ll have to go to the state looking for a bailout, a state that may soon need a lifeline of its own.
It’s getting bleak in the Empire State, which is looking more like the fading British “empire” these days.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
