Financial Titan Goldman Sachs Considers Move from Blue NY to Red Florida
Even the money can follow the money.
Fresh off a fall season that saw billion-dollar firms picking up stakes in Manhattan for the warmer, business-friendly climate of South Florida, New York City’s leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio is now facing news that the heavyweight Goldman Sachs Group is considering a major move south as well.
JUST IN: Goldman Sachs is thinking about moving its asset management business to Florida from New York City https://t.co/whgORMPQvy
— Bloomberg (@business) December 6, 2020
According to a report published Sunday by the financial news outlet Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs executives are scouting locations in Florida’s Palm Beach and Broward counties as potential homes for the company’s asset management arm, which accounts for about $8 billion of the firm’s revenue annually.
Is there an American outside the five boroughs that could blame them?
Not only would a move south be a tax benefit for affected Goldman Sachs employees — the Sunshine State has no state income tax — but the weather is incomparably better, as millions of snowbirds prove every year.
Even more importantly, though, Republican-run Florida has no one like socialist de Blasio, a man who appears bent on turning the United States’ most visible city into a North American banana republic.
And while it has its share of loony and/or dangerous Democratic members of Congress — Frederica Wilson, say, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz — Florida doesn’t have the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the kind of leftist who considered it a badge of honor to kill a plan by Amazon to bring a new headquarters to Queens along with an estimated 25,000 jobs.
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Then there’s the matter of general quality of life.
Not only has New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (another repulsive liberal loved by the mainstream media) botched the state’s response to the coronavirus crisis so badly that the United States Supreme Court stepped in, but de Blasio has made a hash of New York City’s response, too.
Finally, no good Manhattan liberal is likely to mention it in public, but this year’s Black Lives Matter riots that destroyed businesses and disrupted life in the city made for an excellent reason for a self-respecting firm to look for more peaceful pastures elsewhere.
And Florida fits the bill.
But it isn’t just Florida, according to Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs is also looking at Dallas.
As most readers are aware, that’s in Texas — another Republican-run state that doesn’t believe in taxing wealth into nonexistence in the name of what liberals think of as “equality.”
On social media, some liberals checked in with typical liberal nonsense, but the general reaction was understanding.
Wow, another solid biz looking to leave a high tax blue state. Who could have predicted this! ? ??♂️??♂️
— king harambe (@harambepay) December 7, 2020
Cuomo & DeBlasio strike again! pic.twitter.com/IuKQdIWBAk
— Jesse Livermore (@Jess3Livermore) December 7, 2020
With such taxes and @NYCMayor ,many people are considering moving to Florida.. not just Goldman Sachs
— Nataliya (@nataliya__n) December 7, 2020
smart move….NY is burning
— Bens Bombs (@bens_bombs) December 7, 2020
Officially, Goldman Sachs wasn’t confirming the report.
“We are executing on the strategy of locating more jobs in high-value locations throughout the U.S., but we have no specific plans to announce at this time,” a spokesman for the company told Bloomberg in an emailed statement.
But if the actions of others in the financial industry are any guide, there’s good reason to think the company is serious about at least partially moving.
As Fox News noted, the Goldman Sachs report comes after word in October that the megabillion Elliott Management Corp. announced it was leaving New York for Florida, and September’s news that investment icon Carl Icahn was moving Icahn Enterprises to Miami.
Following others …and others will follow
— Gondor Capital Management (@GondorCapital) December 6, 2020
That puts an undeniable strain on New York’s tax hyenas. Last year, according to Fox News, the financial industry accounted for about 18 percent of New York state tax revenue, and about 6 percent of New York City’s tax revenue.
Of course, there’s a downside for Florida Republicans in all this, too, since refugees from high-tax blue states have an unwelcome habit of bringing their liberal voting preferences with them when they move to more sanely run jurisdictions.
And even if Florida has a Republican governor and state legislature, it already has enough Democrats to make it a perennially purple swing state in presidential elections.
The only real hope is that at some point, enough Americans are going to realize that the class-struggle rhetoric of the de Blasio/AOC variety is not a formula for running an effective government.
No society made up of fallible men and women is ever going to be perfect, as the Founders of this country knew very well. Conservative principles and practices of limited government and individual freedom, however, have been proven effective over and over.
Big-dollar firms are voting with their feet for Republican states, and even money follows the money.
One day, Democrats might even realize why.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
