Between 2000 and 2025, New York State’s all-funds budget grew from $77.5 billion to $241.5 billion — an increase of 212%.
In that same 25 years, New York’s population grew by 4.7%.
Read that again. The budget grew 212%. The population grew 4.7%. The budget grew 45 times faster than the number of people it supposedly serves.
This is not a rounding error. This is not a quirk of accounting. This is a quarter century of institutional appetite — a government that grows not because it must, but because it can. Because the people who write the budgets in Albany are not the people who pay them.
Florida Did It Differently. The Numbers Don’t Lie.
Before you accept the Albany line that “New York is just expensive to govern,” consider what has happened in Florida over the same 25 years.
Florida’s population grew by 44% — adding 7.1 million new residents, many of them former New Yorkers. That is a state absorbing massive growth in schools, roads, hospitals, and services. And yet Florida’s budget grew by just 30% over the same period.
Let that sink in. Florida added nine times more people than New York — and its budget grew at one-seventh the rate.
New York’s budget is now more than double Florida’s. In 2000, they were comparable. Florida’s budget was actually larger than New York’s. Today, New York spends $122 billion more per year than Florida.
And what do we have to show for it?
18.98M → 19.87M
New York
16.0M → 23.1M
What It Is Costing Your Family
Every dollar Albany spends comes from somewhere. It comes from the businesses that employ your neighbors. It comes from the paychecks of teachers, nurses, plumbers, and accountants. It comes from the savings of retirees who spent their lives building something here.
In the year 2000, the cost of New York State government consumed roughly 10 cents of every dollar a typical New York family earned.
Today it consumes an estimated 13.5 cents of every dollar.
That is a 35% increase in the government’s claim on what you earn — even as your income has grown, even as you have worked harder, even as costs have risen everywhere else too.
In Florida, that number went the other direction. In 2000, Florida’s government consumed 14.8 cents of every dollar a family earned. Today it consumes just 7.3 cents — less than half what it was.
The gap between what it costs to live under New York’s government versus Florida’s government? For a family of four, that difference is now $27,988 per year. Nearly $28,000 — every single year — that a New York family pays that a Florida family does not.
That is a car payment. That is a college fund. That is the difference between a family that gets ahead and a family that treads water until it can’t anymore — and then calls a moving truck.
This Is Why They’re Leaving
The data does not lie about what is happening to our population. New York’s population peaked at 20.2 million in 2020. Since then, it has fallen. In the last five years, as Albany was increasing the budget by another 35.7%, New York was losing residents.
Think about what that means. The state is spending dramatically more money — on fewer people. The cost per New Yorker is rising not just because the budget is growing, but because the denominator keeps shrinking.
Your friends who moved to Florida are not traitors. They are rational people who did the math. Your neighbors who relocated to Tennessee or the Carolinas were not abandoning their roots. They were protecting their families’ financial futures. The businesses that left — the manufacturers, the financial firms, the tech startups that chose Austin over Albany — were not being disloyal. They were surviving.
New York is not losing people because it lacks charm or culture or opportunity. It is losing people because its government has decided, year after year, budget cycle after budget cycle, that there is no limit to what it can extract from the people who remain.
Albany, This Is Your Alarm Bell
Governor Hochul, Senate Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins, Speaker Heastie — this is directed at you.
In the five years since 2020, you have increased the state budget by $63.5 billion. That is not a typo. In five years, you added more to the state budget than the entire budget of most states in America. You did this while the population you govern was actively shrinking.
You will tell us it was for education. Some of it was — the Foundation Aid phase-in was real and overdue. You will tell us it was for Medicaid. Some of it was — the pandemic created genuine obligations. You will tell us it was necessary. And some of it was.
But not all of it. Not even most of it.
The Cuomo years from 2010 to 2015 proved that discipline is possible. When the 2% spending cap was in effect, the budget grew just 11.9% over five years — and the sky did not fall. Schools stayed open. Roads got plowed. Medicaid patients received care. The essential functions of government continued. It turned out that the growth wasn’t all essential. It was institutional. It was political. It was the product of a government that has learned it faces no real consequences for spending more.
Until now. Because the consequences are leaving the state.
What Staying Looks Like
This is not a call to dismantle government. This is not an argument that New York should become Florida or Texas or anywhere else. New York is New York — dense, complex, expensive, and extraordinary. Some level of higher spending is legitimate and real.
But 212% over 25 years — for 4.7% more people — is not legitimate. It is not explainable. It is not defensible.
The New Yorkers who remain — the ones who love this state too much to leave, who are staying out of stubbornness or loyalty or hope — they deserve a government that treats their money with the same discipline they apply to their own lives. They deserve leaders who understand that every dollar spent in Albany is a dollar extracted from a family in Brooklyn, a small business in Buffalo, a farm in the North Country, a diner in Utica.
They deserve an answer to a simple question:
If Florida can serve 23 million people on $119 billion — why does New York need $241 billion to serve 19 million?
We are waiting, Albany. The people who haven’t left yet are waiting.
And our patience, unlike your budget, has limits.
Data sources: New York State Division of the Budget (enacted all-funds budgets); Florida Office of Economic & Demographic Research; NASBO State Expenditure Report; U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates Program; FRED median household income series (MEHOINUSNYA646N, MEHOINUSFLA646N); Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U annual averages. All figures verified against primary government sources. Per capita figures adjusted to 2025 dollars.
NYS Exposed is a data journalism project dedicated to government accountability. We do not accept advertising, political donations, or funding from any government entity. Our data is public. Our methodology is transparent. Our only agenda is the truth.