Tobias reports:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) made a personal call to JetBlue chief executive Robin Hayes Wednesday in an effort to dissuade the airline CEO from moving the firm’s Long Island City headquarters to Florida.
Okay, but why? What is the case? What, specifically, has New York done to deserve to keep JetBlue? New York has an increasingly unattractive business environment, within which large companies are often treated as enemies, and the center of political gravity in the state is with figures such as Letitia James and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who hope to make that worse. JetBlue is a business; it’s not a tourist board. And, as I’m told, elections have consequences.
Ah, but:
On Thursday, Schumer told The Post he wanted to remind Hayes that “JetBlue’s roots and its future are here in New York.” He also pointed out the billions of dollars in federal aid that airlines like it have received during the coronavirus crisis.
And this matters because? If New York had given JetBlue a bunch of aid, only to see it up and move to Florida, the state would be rightly upset. But it didn’t; the federal government did. The aim of that federal aid (which I oppose, but hey, I’m not in charge) was to keep the airlines afloat, not to keep them in specific areas. Florida is an American state, too.
And, increasingly, a much more attractive one.