Breitbart Business Digest Weekly Wrap: Wear Better Shoes and Don’t Die in New York

One Big Piece of Financial Advice: Don’t Die in New York

The Weekly Wrap: Immortality Is Looking Increasingly Appealing

Welcome back to Friday. This is the Breitbart Business Digest weekly wrap, which has decided that we’re never going to die because it is just getting too unaffordable.

This week, we learned that New York City’s mayor came up with a new way to chase out anyone who isn’t poor, that Washington has a new dress code, and that it is faintly possible that the housing market has remembered how to stand upright without assistance. Across the Atlantic, Britain continued its long farewell to greatness by deciding that Churchill is too controversial for currency, while here at home Adam Smith was once again invoked by people who would be alarmed to discover that he had actually read Adam Smith. Meanwhile oil shot higher, stocks fell lower, and somewhere in the distance Zohran Mamdani began licking his chops at the thought of taxing whatever remains.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to lower the threshold for New York’s estate tax to $750,000 from the current $7 million and to raise the top rate from 16 percent to 50 percent. Since the median sale price for a home in New York is $875,000 and the median asking price is $1,000,000, that’s a tax that will hit more than half of all homeowners in New York based on the value of their homes alone. In Manhattan, where the median price is $1,400,000, it will round up nearly all homeowners. If you can’t put one foot on your stove and the other in your shower while lying in your bed, you’re probably in the estate tax bracket.

What’s more, the tax is not just on real estate values. So, even if your New York City home’s value doesn’t push you over the threshold for the Mamdani grave tax, your savings and investments might. That would be one of the lowest estate tax thresholds in the country. Even those commies out in Oregon have a $1 million threshold, which is twice the median home price. Most states have no estate tax at all.

That is, of course, assuming you still have any assets if you stay in New York long enough to die there. Keep in mind that Mamdani has also proposed raising the citywide property tax rate by 9.5 percent, to 13.45 percent, from the current 12.28 percent. The Citizens Budget Commission estimates this would amount to a property tax hike of about $700 a year for a typical owner of a one-, two- or three-family home.

Alternatively, Mayor Mamdani has said he would prefer to raise income taxes on the wealthy. But New York City residents already face one of the highest combined local and state tax burdens in the country, higher even than Californistan. The rule that you get less of whatever you tax also applies to wealth. Keep raising taxes on the wealthy and pretty soon they’ll decide to make themselves scarce.

The odds of the new estate tax hike being enacted are considered low—for now. But why risk it? If you are going to die—and, let’s face it, we all are—make sure you don’t die in New York City. And the best way to do that is to get yourself and your assets out of the Big Apple while you still can.

Trump Washes the Feet of His Cabinet Members

The latest delightful detail from Trump world has nothing to do with tariffs, foreign policy, or budget fights. According to a Wall Street Journal report, President Trump has developed a fondness for $145 Florsheim dress shoes and has started handing them out to cabinet secretaries, advisers, lawmakers, and friends, often asking afterward whether they are actually wearing them. It is a very Trumpian story, not because it is harsh or ideological, but because it turns a simple preference in men’s dress into a kind of shared style code for the people around him.

Trump has always understood that power in Washington is theatrical; but even by those standards, the Florsheim phase is magnificent. Other presidents handed out pens, cuff links, or commemorative coins. Trump, naturally, has moved on to corrective footwear. Somewhere in the federal government right now, a cabinet secretary is standing a little straighter, not because he has discovered moral courage, but because he has been bullied out of his Italian loafers and into a pair of presidentially approved oxfords. It is an exquisitely Trumpian form of patronage: not merely loyalty, but coordinated podiatry. In this White House, the surest sign of favor is no longer access to the Oval Office but the silent knowledge that the president has looked at your feet, judged your shoes unworthy, and resolved to save you.

The Housing Market Is Alive!

After years of looking half-dead on a chaise lounge, the housing market has at last pulled itself upright, adjusted its tie, and asked whether anyone has seen its Florsheims. Existing-home sales rose 1.7 percent in February to a 4.09 million annual pace, beating expectations, while housing starts jumped 7.2 percent to a 1.487 million rate. The old boy is not exactly sprinting, but he is no longer flat on the divan whispering about mortgage rates and inventory constraints.

What They Done to Churchill, They Do to Old Hickory Next

Britain is preparing to swap Winston Churchill and the rest of the great men of history off its banknotes in favor of wildlife, because in modern Britain a hedgehog is safer than a hero. A hedgehog never said anything regrettable about empire, never held views now deemed insufficiently therapeutic, and, unlike Churchill, can defend itself by becoming a small ball of spikes. It is hard to cancel an animal whose principal political program is snuffling around a garden and trying not to be run over by a Volvo.

And it’s not just the great men who are being disappeared. Jane Austen is out too.

This is the natural endpoint of British public life. First they came for statues, then flags, then songs, then the right to speak of England as anything more substantial than a vague carbon-neutral meadow. Now even the currency must be morally laundered through woodland creatures. In today’s Britain, Churchill may have saved the nation, but a badger has never offended the faculty lounge.

As fun as it is to laugh at the Brits—250 years ago, we fought a revolution for the right to do so—over here in the land still called free we should not get too cocky. How long before they send Andrew Jackson’s face—now glaring at us from the $20 bill—down a trail of tears? George Washington owned slaves. Why should Americans be forced to honor him every time we reach for a dollar or a quarter? Benjamin Franklin? Nobody remembers anything about him except that he’s old, dead, and white, so that’s probably enough to summon the money changers. Alexander Hamilton might be safe as long as many Americans think he was our first hip-hop artist Treasury Secretary.

Oil! Oil! Oil!

Oil ended the week above $100 a barrel, and the national average price-per-gallon of gas rose to $3.60. The stock market, which lately moves in the opposite direction of oil prices, took a beating, with the S&P 500 falling to the lowest level of the year.

There is a pretty good reason that oil and gas are negatively correlated with stock prices. The more money Americans spend filling up their cars, the less we have to spend on other goods and services.

Silver lining? This is slightly less true than it used to be. When America was dependent on imported oil, higher oil prices meant more money leaving the U.S. economy. Now it acts like excess withholding taxes. Part of the money will eventually come back into the economy but only with a delay. In the meantime, retail merchants, service providers, and restaurants will suffer.

Double silver lining? The further stocks drop, the less wealth there is for Mamdani’s grave robbers to burgle.

The Wealth of Nations Turns 250

The Washington think tanks and the pages of our once-respected newspapers have been full this week of celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Usually, it is just the libertarians and the dustier Wall Street types who profess a love for Smith. But liberals have now joined in on the party because they see it as yet another way to attack President Trump. The New York Times even ran an op-ed announcing that “This is the Moment Adam Smith Has Been Waiting for.”

The trouble with invoking Adam Smith is that, every so often, somebody reads Adam Smith. Then the whole racket is up. The man long presented as the marble god of frictionless imports turns out to have been rather more interested in making things than in merely buying them cheaply from foreigners. He did not think wealth consisted in gold piled in vaults, but neither did he think it consisted in becoming a nation of shopkeepers browsing a planetary clearance sale. Smith’s recurring concern was production: the habits, capacities, and industriousness that make a country rich. He actually thought tariffs could improve domestic production and were worth having if they produced enough revenue — which is awkward if your entire case depends on pretending he believed the highest economic good was obtaining slightly cheaper herrings from the Dutch forever.