It’s a surprise to no one that young people have been fleeing Long Island for quite some time now.
An exposé in Newsday attributed at least one young graduate’s plans to flee the Island on President Trump’s policies such as federal cuts to the arts, economic uncertainty tied to tariffs, and executive orders targeting agencies such as the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
But for the overwhelming majority of these graduates, the reasons have to do far more with the fact that our taxes and energy costs are among the highest in the nation, as rents and housing prices continue to be out of reach.
Only later in the article does it concede that New York lost 2.7% of its residents between 2020 and 2023, long before these recent Trump policies.
Only in the eleventh paragraph does the article get to the cost of housing and rent. And nowhere in the article is there any mention of how a flooding of 15 million immigrants into the country (with a huge proportion settling in the New York area) has helped saturate the housing market and push rents up further.
The article talks about student loans, but that’s not unique to Long Island. Students around the nation have that debt. What’s different about New York State, Illinois and California, which have been losing people in droves, is that they are overtaxed, overregulated and anti-business.
There is an inverse relationship between the strength of municipal unions in those states and the ability of the population to afford to live in those states.
These extraordinarily powerful unions in blue states have pumped up pensions, healthcare, and salary costs in the public sector to levels not fathomed in other states. Someone has to pay for that. It’s usually the middle class in the private sector.
Look, too, at the archaic laws in New York, such as:
- mandatory arbitration that gives us law enforcement salaries well over $200,000, and overtime payments pumping up pension costs that provide for some pensions for retired public employees hovering around $150,000.
- the ability to get paid for banked unused sick and vacation days, which can permit some public sector employees to retire with payouts of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- unrealistic and outdated early retirement programs that allow some public workers to retire and start collecting pensions after only 20 years on the job.
- the Scaffolding Law that hits owners with 100% liability, even if their workers were negligent in causing their own injuries, That leads to astronomical insurance costs in New York.
- crazy union work rules that result in subway construction in New York City costing seven times more money to construct one mile of tunnel length than those built in Paris or Atlanta.
Yes, the job market plays a role as well, but let’s not forget: jobs were booming in 2019 due to Trump‘s policies that lowered the corporate rate from 35% to 21% and brought tremendous amounts of money parked offshore back to the states.
Income tax cuts also spurred investment in the private sector, which led to very low unemployment and a growth in wages we haven’t seen in a decade.
It’s not a mystery as to how we can keep people on Long Island. Just mirror the policies in those states that are gaining the population we are losing.