New York is a great example of what can happen to a major city as the Great Sorting accelerates. Incentives matter, and all of New York City's policies, even before "democratic socialist" Mayor Zohran Mamdani took the reins, have seemed designed to drive out the productive and attract the indigent. Mamdani's insane policy stances are accelerating this process.
Here's another data point supporting that contention: 865,000 New Yorkers have collected $2.6 billion in welfare payments in 2025, shattering previous records. Granted, this was from before Mayor Mamdani walked into Gracie Mansion, but his municipal government of commies will only speed-boost this disaster.
New York City doled out more than $2.6 billion in cash assistance to city residents in 2025, a Fox News Digital review of city records showed.
The money reached a record 864,999 people, a 30-year high not matched since before former Mayor Rudy Giuliani instituted major welfare reform in the early 2000s.
The $2.6 billion figure represents a 71% increase from 2022's $1.57 billion, data showed.
A 71 percent increase in three years? Holy Moley!
But wait! There's more!
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 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.
This right here is a disaster in the making, and that's for sure and for certain.
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Incentives always matter. Granted, there's a lot of heavy federal monies backing all these programs, like SNAP, but it's still a bit of a head-scratcher as to where all this massive upswing in welfare recipients is coming from. New York City's population has increased only slightly in the period mentioned, from 8.363 million in July of 2022 to 8.585 million in July of 2025, for a net increase of about 222,000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau. So why the dramatic jump in welfare payments?
It can only be the kind of people who are leaving New York, and the ones who are staying or moving to the Big Apple. As with so many of our big cities, it's a case where the productive are leaving in increasing numbers, and the dependency cadres are staying, and in the case of New York, may even be increasing, to take advantage of Mayor Mamdani's endless communist gravy train of free Schiff.
And he'll be doubling down on stupid.
Though Mamdani inherited the state of his city's welfare system from his predecessors, his policy decisions indicate a continuation of the upward rise in payments.
The city's new nearly $126 billion budget that Mamdani and city councilors agreed to in June contains a $14.63 billion outlay for the HRA, which handles welfare and social services.
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.
Wealthy New Yorkers are increasingly looking at places like Florida and Texas, low-tax, business-friendly jurisdictions that should welcome them, as long as they leave their old voting habits back in the city that was wrecked by them. And, sooner or later, Zohran Mamdani and his ilk will run out of other people's money - and I wouldn't want to be in the big chair in Gracie Mansion when that day arrives.
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