New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at the site of the Gateway Project Construction on Feb. 17, 2026, in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
By C. Douglas Golden March 20, 2026 at 4:30am
In 2022, defending her governance and her state’s political atmosphere against a wave of high-value residents threatening to decamp, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was practically giddy in her defiance: Get the heck out of Dodge, and don’t come back.
Referring to her Republican adversaries and their confederates, Hochul had this to say: “Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong. Okay? Get out of town. Because you don’t represent our values.”
She didn’t explain what those values are, but New Yorkers have never felt any particular reason to explain the certain je ne sais quoi they attach to both the Empire State and its largest city. And who could blame them?
Who could resist the charm of rats who go viral for dragging entire slices of pizza through the subway, or getting mugged by a man with 140-odd arrests out on cashless bail? (When Leonard Bernstein wrote the line, “New York, New York, it’s a hell of a town,” I don’t think he meant it quite as literally as those words have become.) Or, if you don’t like the city, there’s always upstate — which is just like any other snowy expanse in the Northeast, only with higher taxes!
Well, you’ve got to hand it to Gov. Hochul: She can eat her words like that rat could eat pizza, given four years’ time.
And that’s not all you can hand to her, because the kind of verbal U-turn on that she pulled off Wednesday was not only profoundly stupid, but part of a unique genus of stupidity heretofore unobserved among politicians — who, as a rule, display no shortage of it.
Because not only does she want those New Yorkers she chased off to Florida to come back to New York out of some penumbrous duty to pay for her state’s governmental profligacy, she wants them to drag their friends back, too. Think of it as an MLM scheme for broke bureaucrats.
Speaking at the Politico Summit — an event where such self-unaware insipidity could pass without involuntary giggles from the audience — in the state capital of Albany, Hochul pleaded with those who had decamped to Florida to use the round-trip portion of the bus ticket she told them to buy a few short years ago, now that the state has passed a new round of even higher taxes on both residents and corporations to meet budget shortfalls.
“I need people who are high-net-worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state. Right?” she said.
“Now, there are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks. If you want to be supportive, but maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home, because our tax base has been eroded.”
Kathy Hochul making a weak plea for wealthy people who have left New York (to red states like Florida) to come back to pay their high taxes to fund failing (unaccountable) social programs:
“I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we have in… pic.twitter.com/7quhsFyWyn
— Matt Whitlock (@MattWhitlock) March 18, 2026
Yeah, funny how that works. She seems to now realize that “remote work changed everything.”
“There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan or work in New York State, and they were captives to our state. They were going to stay. We saw that that’s not the case.”
I reiterate: Those comments she originally made about “just jump on a bus” were made in 2022 — back when remote work wasn’t just possible, but in some cases mandatory, because a certain segment of the hand-wringing public were all still triple-masking and hanging on every word that dropped from Anthony “I Am the Science” Fauci’s mouth, lest they get a case of the Wu-flu and be bed-ridden for a few days.
Just two years after telling rich Republicans to jump on a bus and head to Florida, NY Gov Kathy Hochul begs rich taxpayers who are in Florida to come back to New York so they can pay more taxes.
Hochul says she needs “high net worth” people to cut her checks to fund New York’s… pic.twitter.com/XhjBI4J0YP
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 19, 2026
And while remote work can indeed stink in terms of productivity, it wouldn’t be difficult to predict which city would go back to in-person work the slowest, if it went back at all: New York City, where even getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan can require an hour’s trip, three train changes, two unhoused meth-heads mistaking your leg for a toilet, and a lifetime’s worth of knowledge of the compendium of arcane and stupid rules that govern public transit service.
(“Oh, this train only makes stops at every third station on Tuesdays on even-numbered days in April! Duh. Anyway, if you switch trains at the next station and go back to where you started, you should make it to where you want to go in another 80 minutes, give or take.”)
But this is a bit of a digression, because the cheek of Hochul’s comments is the real story here. The TL;DR version of her remarks is this: “I have no fiscal continence, so I know I told you to get the hell out, but you need to get the hell back in because you’re a ‘patriotic millionaire’ — right”?
This tone-deaf plea for people of modest wealth — remember, she’s not even talking about those perfidious billionaires here, but millionaires — to act against their economic self-interest to move to a less-livable place governed by fools in order to get herself out of the hole she and other Democrats have dug for themselves would be bad enough already. But to make the remark after she not only invited, but practically ordered, those people to leave just four short years ago makes it exponentially more malignantly clueless.
And most people missed the icing on the cake with the version of Hochul’s clip that made its way around the internet. Sure, you all heard her blame millionaires for deserting her state and taking their sweet, sweet tax dollars with them, and you heard her beg them to shanghai their friends back to their state posthaste so they could “patriotically” bail her out. But what you didn’t hear is who she blamed for part of the mess: Donald J. Trump!
“I know New Yorkers are exasperated,” she said just before her “patriotic millionaires” remark, according to a transcript. “They feel that everything’s stacked against them. They’re not getting ahead, their rents are too damn high, their childcare costs are high, their utility bills — and, thank you to Washington, we’re going to have higher prices at the pump, we already do.”
Sure, you can get a Democrat to eat their words like a rat chomping down on pizza if it means the possibility of additional tax revenue, but you can never force a morsel of self-awareness upon them.
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