Escape from New York: 26 percent of New Yorkers surveyed said they don’t plan to stay in New York State for the next five years.

Investors Business Daily

A survey finds that young New Yorkers are planning to leave the state. Meanwhile, a group agitates for a state millionaires tax. Is it possible these items are linked?

According to a Marist College poll, 36% of New Yorkers under 30 have plans to quit the state within the next five years.

More than three in five (62%) who plan to leave say they are being driven out for economic reasons.

Cost of living, an everlasting issue in much of New York, is the top problem. But taxes and scarce job opportunities were cited as the No. 2 and 3 factors. And they are knots that policymakers can unravel.

The New Yorkers under 30 who plan to depart are the state's future, its intellectual capital, its dynamism and its core. Don't think a young population is important? Just ask the San Francisco officials who are trying to stop the alarming decline of the youth population in their city.

While New Yorkers digest the poll results, the May 12 Coalition — made up of the United Federation of Teachers, the Transport Workers Union, the Coalition for the Homeless and a mob of big health care unions — is demanding that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg "make big banks and millionaires pay."

They want, Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute wrote Wednesday in the New York Post, "a massive tax hike that would send jobs and wealth away from the five boroughs."

If New Yorkers are taxed as the coalition wants, Gelinas points out, people will change their behavior. They will leave, and likely in greater numbers than the 36% of young New Yorkers already planning to do so.

New Yorkers have a history of escaping to lower-tax havens. The Partnership for New York City, a group of 200 CEOs, has noted that between "1998 and 2008, a net total of more than 1.7 million New Yorkers chose to relocate, taking with them their wealth and talent" to "places where the tax burden is less."