Move Over, Wall Street — Here Come the Texas Longhorns

        The New York Stock Exchange opened its doors over 230 years ago. It has been one of the iconic symbols of America’s economic might for more than two centuries.

        But for how much longer?

        Now the challenge for supremacy isn’t coming from London or Tokyo or Hong Kong or Beijing. It’s coming from Texas.

        The Wall Street Journal reported in recent days that the Texas Stock Exchange is now officially open for business, and trading is expected to start soon. Everything is big in Texas, as the saying goes, so New Yorkers should take this rival stock exchange seriously.

        In some ways, the idea that Dallas could become the new financial center makes sense. Texas has no income tax. New York City has the highest income tax, capital gains tax and dividend tax. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is threatening even higher “soak the rich” tax increases as part of his goal of making NYC a socialist mecca. Housing will be free, groceries will be free, health care will be free, buses will be free.

        This isn’t Democratic socialism. This is unmitigated socialism.

        New York was already losing to Texas before any of this happened. Over the past decade, nearly 2 million residents of New York state have fled. Many of them are now in Texas. New York has lost almost $1 trillion of income cumulatively over the past 12 years.

        How has Texas surpassed New York so quickly as a business haven? Almost 300 business headquarters have moved into Texas over the past decade.

        First, Texas lured businesses out of New York with much lower taxes and business-friendly rules.

        Second, it adopted legal structures making Texas a strategic state to incorporate in. It kept the trial lawyers at arm’s length to avoid costly and even crippling lawsuits.

        And now comes the TXSE with the aim of dethroning Wall Street as the financial trading capital of the world.

        I’ve warned the pols in New York many times that Wall Street can’t survive as the financial capital when Manhattan imposes the most punitive taxes in the nation on capital investment. This would be like Nebraska and Iowa putting hefty taxes on corn production. If you tax something, you get less of it.

        Wall Street today pales in comparison to the bustling center of financial trading that it once was. Dallas already has as many financial service jobs as Manhattan. When New Yorkers voted for a socialist to run the city, it was as if they were signing a death sentence for the famous Wall Street bull. It isn’t just rich people who will be hurt if Wall Street continues to hemorrhage jobs. Right now, more than 150,000 New Yorkers’ jobs are tied to the stock exchange and financial trading. Thousands more lower-income service workers are dependent on Wall Street’s success.

        The socialists think this is all unfair given the high Wall Street salaries.

        So the socialist parasites are now killing the host.

        The mystery is why this exodus from Wall Street has taken so long. Why do companies keep paying the New York income tax bills when they and their workers can pay zero income tax deep in the heart of Texas?

        Sadly, over two centuries after the birth of the NYSE, Wall Street could become a ghost town. No jumping out of the windows as during the October 1929 crash, but by 2029, there may not be much of a Wall Street left.

        Meanwhile, all the Ivy League professors at Columbia University still assure the Mamdanis of the world that taxes don’t matter and socialism is a viable form of economic governance. New Yorkers will learn the hard way just how wrong the socialist intellectuals are.

        Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.

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