Bell Tolls for Limbaugh?

Well, it appears that Governor Paterson is heralding the fact that Rush Limbaugh has announced that, because of the recently announced tax increases, he's getting out of New York: "Rush Limbaugh is fed up with taxes in New York and with Gov. David A. Paterson in particular. The radio talk-show host denounced the so-called millionaires’ tax in the new state budget and then announced on the air this week that he would be packing up and leaving town...Mr. Paterson said he was hardly sorry to see him go. “If I knew that would be the result,” he said after a speech Thursday morning in Midtown, “I would’ve thought about the taxes earlier.”

Which raises the obvious question; Is the state better off with Limbaugh leaving and Paterson staying? And in answering this question, isn't it better to see Limbaugh as symbolic of a class? One commenter to the City Room blog captures this: "I don’t care about Rush leaving, but I do think that many will leave when you think that most of these guys will be paying about 60% of their income to Fed, NYC and NYS. What is the benefit of staying? Not much, particularly when media and financial companies are leaving as well. So who gets stuck with the bill at the end of the day for reckless state spending? We do. They’ll hide the additional taxes in the utility bills, phone bills, sales taxes, real estate taxes… but rest assured we will pay. It’s no wonder NY loses its most productive people at a higher rate than any other state (other than CA)."

So while Paterson and the WFP chuckle over the bell tolling for Limbaugh's New York sojourn, it would behoove these folks to remember the message of the John Donne poem:

"Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that."