The Billionaire Whose Second Home Would Be Taxed Meets the Governor Who Decides Whether It Is Taxed; Everyone Is Comfortable With This
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
The Billionaire Whose Second Home Would Be Taxed Meets the Governor Who Decides Whether It Is Taxed; Everyone Is Comfortable With This
The Meeting
NEW YORK — Governor Kathy Hochul agreed to meet with billionaire Ken Griffin, the Citadel LLC founder and one of the wealthiest individuals in the United States, shortly after Mayor Mamdani specifically named Griffin as his poster boy for why a pied–terre tax on luxury second homes worth more than $5 million is necessary. The meeting between the Governor and the most prominent named target of the Mayor’s proposed new tax was characterized by Mamdani’s office as concerning and by Hochul’s office as ‘a normal courtesy meeting with a significant New York business figure.’
The Courtesy Meeting
In the vocabulary of gubernatorial communications, a ‘normal courtesy meeting with a significant New York business figure’ is the characterization that a meeting requires when it would otherwise be characterized as ‘consultation with the person whose financial interests are directly affected by the policy being negotiated between the Governor and the Mayor.’ Both characterizations refer to the same meeting. The difference is the frame. The frame is the thing.
The Griffin Connection
Ken Griffin, who relocated his hedge fund’s headquarters from New York to Miami in 2022 citing Florida’s more favorable tax environment, retains properties in New York City that would be subject to the pied–terre tax that Mamdani is proposing and that Hochul is negotiating. The specific meeting between the Governor and the person most prominently affected by the specific tax the Governor is negotiating is the kind of meeting that ethics guidelines in various jurisdictions require disclosure of and that New York State’s disclosure requirements will document at whatever granularity they require.
The Broader Point
Mamdani’s public identification of Griffin as the tax’s target demographic is a deliberate communication strategy: making the progressive revenue argument concrete by attaching it to the most visible specific beneficiary of the alternative arrangement. The Governor’s meeting with Griffin is the equally deliberate counter-signal: maintaining the access relationship with the business community whose investment Hochul regards as essential to the economy that funds the services Mamdani wants to expand. The signals are the negotiation.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.