If you bought stock in U-Haul in the past couple of years, your retirement account is probably looking better than a lot of other people’s. (Particularly those who invested in Budweiser.) If it feels like there’s a lot of traffic on the roads these days, particularly along the east coast, it’s not your imagination. And most of that traffic is heading south. In the first three months of 2023, more than ten thousand people fled New York and relocated to Florida. If things keep going at this pace, Ron DeSantis is going to run out of places to put them all. (NY Post)

It wasn’t just a pandemic thing.

Another disillusioned batch of more than 10,000 New Yorkers relinquished their driver’s licenses for the Florida version in the first quarter of 2023, extending an ongoing exodus into the Sunshine State.

According to new figures from the Florida Department of Highway Safety, 10,824 Empire Staters swapped out their licenses in the first three months of this year.

The real number is almost certainly higher. This data was collected by scouring the changes in people’s driver’s licenses, so it doesn’t account for children and adults who do not drive. (A lot of people in New York City don’t drive, compared to more rural areas.) The number of people moving to the Sunshine State could easily be twice as large.

As big as that number may sound, it’s actually a decrease from the previous year. In the same three-month period in 2022, more than fourteen thousand New Yorkers made the same move. Of course, that doesn’t mean that conditions in New York have improved. They may just be starting to run out of people who are willing and able to relocate. Some will never leave, no matter how bad things get.

With tongue in cheek, the Post’s editorial board sent out its congratulations to the progressives in New York. Their plan is working to perfection.

Congratulations, Empire State progressives!

Your years-long campaign to drive out average New Yorkers via sky-high taxes, job-killing regulations, soaring energy costs, pro-crime policies and hollowed-out public education is working.

Per a new Siena poll, 27% of New Yorkers plan to leave the state in the next five years.

While realizing that there is plenty of snark in that column, it does almost seem as if this was all intentional. The rise in crime, the increased cost of living, and the failing public schools were all driven by policies enacted by liberal Democrats. How were things supposed to turn out any differently? They can’t have honestly believed that scaling back the police force in a city with the gang problem that New York has would result in less crime. Nobody capable of feeding themselves can be that dumb.

So it appears that the people with any sense left are gone or on their way toward the door. New York will remain a blue state, just as the Democrats want it to. But it will be a smaller state and it will have fewer seats in Congress every ten years. If that’s what they wanted, they’re getting it in spades.