Sean Hannity has left New York behind.
As he informed listeners of his radio show on Tuesday, he has relocated to Florida, finally fed up with New York’s high taxes and sky-high crime rates. Or so he says.
However, his words clearly indicate that the major reason may have had more to do with his ideology than his tax bill or safety. “We are now beginning our first broadcast from my new home, and that is in the free state of Florida,” Hannity said on his iHeartRadio show. “I am out. I am done. I am finished in New York.”
“This migration out of blue states with high taxes, burdensome regulation, high crime, horrible school districts is real,” Hannity said.
The Fox News host said that “finally for the first time that I can think of in my adult life, I actually have representatives in the state that I am living in that share my values.” He named the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and its two Republican senators. We wonder, could he be getting ready to endorse DeSantis for the GOP nomination?
Hannity also hosted his Fox News primetime show from his remote studio in the Sunshine State, repeating some of the same comments about the benefits of Florida. The Foxhost and loyal Trump supporter is not new to Florida, he has long owned a home there. And his property interests don’t end there. In 2018, the Guardian reported on a property empire which then extended to Georgia, Alabama, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Vermont.
It’s true that Florida has no state income tax. New York’s state tax on incomes above $5 million, on the other hand, reaches 10.3%. But while the tax rate in New York may be high, what Hannity is not mentioning is that it was aggravated by the 2017 tax law, a signature piece of legislation signed by his good friend then-President Donald Trump. He too switched his residency to Florida to avoid the tax burden that he himself had exacerbated. Trump’s 2017 bill put limits on the amount of state and local taxes that taxpayers can deduct on their federal returns.
The higher tax rates in New York are largely driven by New York’s higher average house values ($487,000 versus $282,000 in Florida. Higher house values are not necessarily a bad thing.
Looking at what the two states spend on education, we see that New York’s overall education spending per capita was more than twice as high as Florida’s ($4,759 versus $2,229 in 2020). In both states, the vast majority of that spending was driven by K-12 education with virtually all the rest going to higher education, which includes two- and four-year colleges and universities.
Many would argue that spending on education is a sound investment for any society. Hannity disagrees.
The far right talk show host, who has lived in one of the most exclusive enclaves in New York, Center Island in the town of Oyster Bay, also fails to mention that New York’s per-capita income remains much higher than Florida’s.
While Hannity’s complaints about taxes may be justified, his claims about crime are not so accurate. Indeed, according to the 2020 statistics provided by the FBI, New York boasts lower crime rates than Florida.
To be precise, while rates for violent crime were similar in both states, crime against property was 36% lower in New York and homicides were 44% lower as well (2.9 per 100,000) than in Florida (5.2), whose homicide rate is slightly above the national average rate of 5 per 100,000. Taken together, this data strongly suggests that crime is much more common in Florida than in New York.
Perhaps what Hannity is not telling his listeners is that he feels more at home in Florida thanks to his views on racism, partisan politics, cancel culture, white supremacy and censorship in education—all topics on which he has frequently preached and railed against on his radio and television shows and which are the linchpins of his devotion to the far right and to the person of Donald Trump.
