A LESSON IN PROGRESSIVE ECONOMICS FOR PEOPLE WHO SLEPT THROUGH BASIC BIOLOGY

Let me tell you about a garden.

Not a metaphor about hope or healing or some poem you would find tacked to a kindergarten bulletin board. No. This is a garden about money, taxation, and the spectacular self-inflicted economic implosion of places like New York City and California. Stay with me.

You have a plot of land. Good soil. You plant tomatoes, peppers, zucchini — the usual. But something remarkable happens. A few of your tomato plants take off. We are talking ENORMOUS plants. Deep root systems. Sprawling vines. Fruit so large and red and dense that people from TOWNS away start making the drive just to buy from you. Word spreads. A line forms. Cash starts coming in.

You now have, in the language of economics, a comparative advantage. You have high-value producers.

And you — a rational person — water them more. You fertilize them more. You stake them so they do not collapse under the weight of their own productivity. Because you understand, on a basic biological level, that MORE inputs into a HIGH-OUTPUT plant means MORE yield. You protect what is working.

But then. THEN.

You attend a city council meeting.

Someone stands up and says the big tomato plants are UNFAIR. They are taking more sunlight than the other plants. More water. More nutrients from the soil. While other tomatoes — smaller, struggling, producing less — are being LEFT BEHIND. This, the speaker announces, is INEQUITY. Something must be done.

The council nods. They vote.

New policy: the large tomato plants will have their fertilizer reduced. Water allocation will be redistributed — EQUALLY — across all plants regardless of output. And beginning next season, a percentage of the fruit produced by the large plants will be harvested EARLY, before ripening, and redistributed to compensate for their UNFAIR advantage over the smaller plants.

You object. You are told you do not understand equity.

You go home.

First season under the new policy, the big plants slow down. Not dramatically. Just… noticeably. Root stress. Less fruit. The ones that came from towns away still show up, but there is less to sell, so you raise prices slightly to maintain your margin. A few regular buyers grumble and start checking other gardens. You think: maybe next season will be better.

It is not.

Second season, the redistribution formula expands. The council, noting that inequality persists — because the big plants are STILL outperforming despite the cuts — decides the problem was insufficient redistribution. So they take more. A larger percentage of your best fruit. Redirected. Shared. Spread around. Because, and this is an actual quote from the council chair, “abundance must serve the community.”

Here is what happens to the big tomato plants when you consistently deny them water, fertilizer, and the actual fruit they produce.

They die.

Not overnight. Slowly. The vines thin out. The leaves yellow at the edges first — you barely notice. Then the root system, deprived of nutrients for two seasons, begins to contract. Less surface area. Less water uptake. Fewer tomatoes. Smaller tomatoes. Then, one morning, you go out and the main vine is just… brown. Desiccated. Done.

You pull it out of the ground.

The buyers from out of town still come that summer. Force of habit. They walk your rows and look at what you have — the small plants that the policy was designed to help, now receiving full water and fertilizer allocation, their redistribution share now available to them.

They pick up a tomato. Small. Pale. Slightly bitter.

They put it back.

“What happened to the big ones?” they ask.

You explain the policy. The equity framework. The redistribution formula.

They look at you for a moment. Then they get back in their cars and drive to a garden two counties over — the one that did not attend that city council meeting — and they spend their money there.

Your revenue drops forty percent that year. You cannot afford the same quantity of seeds for the following spring. You plant fewer rows. Smaller garden. The council, reviewing the data, notes that inequality in your garden has been substantially reduced. The gap between your best plants and your worst plants is much smaller now.

This is technically true.

It is also true that your best plants are dead and your worst plants are producing fruit that nobody wants to buy.

New York City. California. Illinois. New Jersey. Pick one.

New York has the highest state income tax in the nation for top earners — 10.9% at the state level, plus the city tax on top of that, plus federal. In 2022, the top 1% of earners in New York State paid approximately 46% of ALL state income taxes. Nearly HALF the revenue. From 1% of the population.

So what did the progressive policy apparatus do with that knowledge?

They raised taxes. Again. And again. And proposed more increases. Because the big plants were not being fair.

Between 2020 and 2023, New York lost more than 300,000 residents — a net population outflow that included a DISPROPORTIONATE number of high earners. Goldman Sachs relocated thousands of positions. Citadel — one of the most profitable hedge funds on the planet — moved its HEADQUARTERS from Chicago to Miami. Ken Griffin, its founder, said explicitly that the tax and regulatory environment made it impossible to justify staying.

The tomato plant pulled its own roots out of the ground and walked to Florida.

Florida, which has NO state income tax.

Florida, which gained more than 700,000 residents between 2020 and 2023.

Florida, which is now collecting MORE tax revenue than projected — not because they raised rates, but because the producers MOVED THERE.

You do not have to take my word for it. This is arithmetic. Not ideology. Arithmetic.

California. Oh, California.

The state with the highest income tax rate in the nation (13.3% at the top). The state that, as recently as 2022, was seriously debating a WEALTH TAX that would follow former residents and tax them on ASSETS even after they LEFT. They were literally going to chase the tomato plants down the road and keep harvesting from vines that were no longer in their soil.

Elon Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas. Oracle moved to Texas. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise moved to Texas. Charles Schwab moved to Texas. These are not small operations. These are BILLIONS in capital, tens of thousands of jobs, and ENORMOUS tax bases — gone.

California has been running structural deficits while simultaneously leading the nation in income tax rates. The people paying those rates are leaving. The people staying are, on average, paying less — not because the rate went down, but because the high earners are no longer there to pay it.

Quinn’s Law Number One: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.

Raise taxes to collect more revenue. Collect less revenue. Raise taxes again. Collect even less.

Quinn’s Law Number Twenty-Seven: liberals have never seen a tax hike they did not like.

They keep going back to the dead vine. Keeps harvesting it. Getting confused when nothing comes out.

And here is the part that nobody on the left wants to sit with.

The WORKERS. The regular people. The ones the whole policy was supposedly designed to protect.

When Citadel left Chicago, it did not just take Ken Griffin’s personal income with it. It took the salaries of the people who worked there. The accountants, the IT staff, the building maintenance contracts, the lunch orders from the deli across the street, the dry cleaning, the parking revenue, the office supply vendors. Every high-earner who leaves New York takes with them a consumption footprint that supported dozens of lower-income jobs in their orbit.

The big tomato plant did not just produce tomatoes. It shaded the nearby plants from wind. Its root system aerated the soil. Its size attracted the buyers who, while they were there, ALSO bought peppers and zucchini. When it died — the buyers stopped coming. The other plants lost their wind protection. And NOBODY bought the peppers either.

The council never modeled for that. Because Quinn’s Law Number Sixteen: liberals view the world the way they think it should be, not the way it is.

The parable does not end with the big plants dying. That would be too clean.

Here is what comes after.

With revenue down, the city or state faces a budget shortfall. The council does not — CANNOT, politically — admit the policy caused the problem. So they look for the next solution. They propose new taxes on the medium-sized producers. After all, they are now the biggest ones left. They are probably not paying their fair share either.

A few of the medium plants look around, do the math, and leave.

The council raises taxes on the remaining ones.

More leave.

Eventually you are left with a garden of small, struggling plants, no buyers, no revenue, and a council that is STILL explaining to anyone who will listen that the real problem is that not enough was redistributed, not enough was taxed, not enough was done.

Detroit. Once the wealthiest city per capita in America. Now among the most impoverished. The plants did not leave overnight. They left over decades. Every policy chased more of them out. The last ones to go turned off the lights.

And the council blamed the plants.

Jim Quinn’s First Law, one more time, because it deserves repetition in a classroom setting:

Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.

The intent: tax the rich, fund the poor, reduce inequality, lift all boats. The result: the rich leave, revenue collapses, the poor lose the economic ecosystem the rich sustained, inequality RISES among those who remain, and the boats run aground because nobody is left to pay for the dock.

This is not a theory. It is a pattern. Documented. Repeated. Predictable. And STILL unlearned by every progressive city government that tries it for the first time as though the hundred previous failed experiments did not happen.

I teach biology. Here is what I know from biology:

You do not punish your best-performing cells for outperforming. You study them. You replicate their conditions. You ask what they are doing right. A body that attacks its own high-functioning tissue is not pursuing equity. It has an autoimmune disorder.

Progressive tax policy is, functionally, an autoimmune disorder applied to an economy.

And the patient keeps getting sicker. And the treatment prescribed is always more of the same medication that caused the illness.

Water the whole garden equally. Kill your best plants. Wonder why you are hungry.

That is the parable.

That is also the budget of the state of California.

But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who spent twenty-three years watching what happens when you deny essential resources to anything that is actually producing results, whether it is a soldier, a student, or a tomato plant.

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Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.

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