More than $2.6 billion was handed out to 864,999 New York City residents in 2025, the news coming as people are fleeing the state due to high taxes and a socialist mayor who has made it his mission to “tax the rich.”
Data from city records Fox News reviewed showed the billion dollar number was a 71 percent increase since 2022 when it was $1.57 billion, the outlet reported Saturday.
“When coupled with payments from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the city paid out more than $7 billion in welfare to residents in 2024, according to a Fox News analysis of data from the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA),” the outlet said, adding, “The rise in welfare payments comes as some of New York City’s wealthiest contemplate a Big Apple exodus due to what many have described as a policy environment unfriendly to businesses and moneymakers.”
Indeed, Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) in April said there would be an annual tax on high-value properties owned by those who did not live in the area full-time, Breitbart News reported.
“When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today, we’re taxing the rich. I’m thrilled to announce we’ve secured a pied-à-terre tax, the first in New York’s history. This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full time in the city, like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million,” he stated:
According to the New York Post, there has not been a lot of reform regarding the city’s welfare crisis since he took office, and many fear more and more of the city’s richest residents will leave and take jobs with them.
“This is the Communist Playbook 101: make everyone reliant on the government, so the masses have no choice but to support the people signing their checks,” Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens) told the outlet. “This is only going to get worse as the Democratic Socialists of America ramp up their tax-the-rich rhetoric and drive even more jobs out of the city. With every job they force out, the far left gets one more person dependent on them. It’s all part of the plan.”
The news came as the state of New York in 2024 was handing out cash welfare payments to migrants, per Breitbart News.
The outlet reported in March that “Nearly half of households headed by immigrants, those legally and illegally living in the United States, are on one or more forms of welfare, a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis of Census Bureau data reveals.”
More recently, the blue states of New York and California have been losing billions of dollars as residents fled to other states looking for a better life and relief from high taxes.
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