New York is No. 1 - in people leaving

Don Shuler showed me the absolute best way to celebrate the Fourth of July

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For many New Yorkers, the dream is to retire from the rat race, the snow shoveling and high taxes and spend their golden years amidst the palm trees and beaches of Florida and other parts south.

With the Baby Boomers retiring in record numbers that has come to pass.

More than 630,000 people have exited the state since 2020.

They've just packed up and left.

Leaving us No. 1 in people leaving and our top export senior citizens.

It's not just New York City, it is happening in every corner of the Empire State, but especially in small, rural communities.

The Times-Union's Molly Burke addressed the issue last week with her deep dive, "What's pushing New Yorkers to leave the state?"

Retirements are the first thing that come to mind.

But oddly enough, the largest age group exiting New York is families with young children looking for better opportunities for housing. It is not unusual for people to find houses of comparable cost in the South at twice the size.

Warmer weather is often just a fringe benefit.

While housing and weather are certainly part of the equation, so are New York's high taxes and cost of living. New York's taxes are the highest in the country while its cost of of living is ranked fourth.

Oddly, Burke reported Rep. Elise Stefanik believes "record crime" is the reasons so many are leaving the state. But when you look at the statistics, crime rates are generally down across the state, even in New York City. I wished the reporter had asked Stefanik where the rampant crime was in her district because I don't feel less safe traveling around Queensbury, Glens Falls and Lake George.

Stefanik, whose rural North Country districts are bleeding residents every year and causing shortages in volunteers and workers, told Burke it was the policies of Democrats that were pushing people out of the state and if taxes remained high "there will be no more residents left to tax and fund their radical, socialist programs."

Oddly enough, Stefanik lives in one of the few counties that continues to grow - Saratoga County - despite the crime, high taxes and rising cost of living. Albany has seen a 2 percent increase in population since 2020 and parts of the Hudson Valley are seeing growth as people leave New York City.

Burke reveals in her reporting that while the highest earners in New York have seen their taxes go up, those in other income brackets are paying less. In fact, the number of millionaires in New York increased by 15,000 between 2020 and 2022.

New York also leads the nation in taxing the top 40 percent of income-earners. For the lowest 20 percent of income earners in the state, New York is ranked 24th.

That adds some context to the high taxes. Maybe they aren't as bad as they seem for the middle class.

But there are other things to consider before calling the moving van company.

Let's start with climate change.

Florida is already experiencing it with regular flooding and a bull's eye on the state for every hurricane forming in the Atlantic. Florida's current governor refuses to do anything to prevent or slow climate change progress. In fact, his has forbidden government officials from even talking about it.

Thankfully, state officials have lots of sand to bury their heads.

One result from climate change has been the doubling of home insurance costs in Florida. So while the cost of living in the South might be cheaper, some of those savings might be offset by spiraling insurance premiums.

While climate change is something to be wary of in Florida, I see it as a positive for those of us in the northeast. The winters the past five years have been milder which means fewer inches of snow to remove and lower heating bills.

But more importantly, we have something in the northeast that others around the country desperately seek - water.

We still get rain.

We still have rivers and cool lakes and that is not about to change anytime soon.

It's clear there is no national political will to address climate change.

So, here's my prediction: As the earth warms, a reverse migration will occur from places south to the northeast. At some point, the New York Legislature will have to rescind the wild status of the Adirondack Park and open it up to people from Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and Long Island trying to get out of the frying pan.

Sure, that's not going to happen over night and thankfully, I won't live to see it, but if the climate trends continue, it will happen.So make sure the grandchildren hold onto the old homestead in the Adirondacks.

I know I'm not leaving.

The snow is still pretty to look at and you can't beat snuggling up by a wood stove on a snowy day.

At some point, the snowbirds will return to the nest.

But they might not be able to afford it.

Thanks again

A reader contacted me on Monday wondering if she had contributed to this newsletter's cause.

I checked and they had not. They immediately became a paid subscriber.

For more than a year before accepting paid contributions The Front Page readers were making pledges without being charged. When we finally went paid in February, there were approximately 50 payments that did not go through, many of them from more than a year earlier.

I suspect one of those payments was the reader who contacted me Monday.

We continue to be humbled by all the support we have gotten over the past five months and we hope you continue to share our work and support our new kind of of journalism.

Christmas is coming

This coming weekend, the decorating committee at the Chapman Museum will be doing a dry run by decorating a few windows with Christmas decorations to see what it looks like.

So far this year, we'e had four Christmas trees donated, 16 wreaths from Ace Hardware and a few hundred dollars in cash to buy decorations.

There have been others who have donated different types of ornaments and lights.

If you would like to donate any decorations, contact me at tingleykenneth4@gmail.com.

You can make a cash donation through the Chapman website. Make sure to stipulate it is for the Christmas decorations.

Fourth of July tradition

Don Shuler, a retired minister from Ohio who I have written about before, dropped me a note about his own unique Fourth of July tradition.

He wrote that he and his wife Meg, reread the Declaration of Independence on the morning of the Fourth of July and discuss it.

"Many of us, when we were younger and in grade school, memorized part of the opening to the Declaration of Independence: `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights—that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…' But this is only a small part of the Declaration."

It was a great point.

Don went into detail about the Declaration is really a list of grievances against a king who had denied the Founding Fathers freedoms and imposed his will on them.

The similarities to our country's possible future cannot be ignored.

I wish more people took their citizenship as seriously as Don and Meg.

Newspaper donation

After reading Monday's column on the lawsuit against Mississippi Today, it was heartening to hear from so many of our readers to say they were immediately going to make a donation to the nonprofit newspaper that recently won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing corruption in state government.

On Tuesday, I made my own donation.

I hope you will consider making one as well.

Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.