The goal is to get people to give up their mobility, which coincides both practually and culturally with the idea of freedom—the right to travel without papers anywhere in the nation. But if you want to enter Manhattan, it will cost you a lot more, thanks to a new mobility control plan.
New York’s Governor, Frau Hochul, she of the surveillance, child propagandizing, and public health detention state, has announced a traffic reduction scheme for the congestion zones on Manhattan Island.
“New York city will be the first city in America to charge Americans just to go to work in the morning”
“Americans will have to pay $23 per day”
“Passenger vehicles will be charged $15 to enter the congestion zone”
“Trucks between $26 and $36”
“The tolls will be charged once… pic.twitter.com/kMiREg4pI6
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) December 6, 2023
The unicorn principle, the fantasy, is that this will reduce transportation emissions by forcing people to pay the city to use crowded, infection-spreading public transportation. What it will actually do is drive up the price of everything moved into the city every day. Not perhaps by a noticeable sum. A drink in Manhattan already costs more than twenty dollars. Everything is expensive. But adding to the cost of doing business always adds to the costs paid by customers.
For some, this might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. They didn’t move after the COVID tyranny. They’ve suffered through the exponential rise in crime and endured the burden of illegal immigrants and the swelling sea of homelessness. Perhaps this is that ‘one more thing,’ the result of which would be increased migration away from the Big Crapple and the State of New York.
Those who will leave are those who can. This typically means upper middle class and upper class. People of relative means who are not rich by modern standards but who represent the middle class. Not impoverished or poor. Not exactly blue-collar, though many blue-collar trades make what many would call rich man’s wages. And not the very rich who view the new sums as less than loose change.
We’ve seen it in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and New York. The true final form of the policies of the progressive project. A two-class system. The Elite and the dependent.
It will not be absolute, but these rising burdens will push the lower-middle class and the poor further down the economic ladder – widening the gap as those who can leave do. So, in a way, Hochul’s plan will work. There will be fewer cars and trucks in Manhattan, but with fewer dollars from tolls, fees, and taxes, there will also be less revenue. The new “traffic” tax meant to backstop infrastructure or other improvements – much of which will never reach a single bolt or shovelful of asphalt – will cost more in the long run.
Manhattan and New York will, ultimately, pay a higher toll, and they are just too damn ideologically captured by the lies they tell each other about the role of government and people to see it.
Or perhaps New Yorkers will find themselves a Republican Governor and Mayor who will walk the state back off the ledge.
Sorry. Just having my own little unicorn moment.
