A year after railing about the high tax burden on wealthy New Yorkers, Rush Limbaugh, the super-rich conservative radio talk-show host has sold his Liberace-meets-Ivana-Trump-meets-Donatella Versace Fifth Avenue penthouse to an undisclosed buyer.
Mr. Limbaugh’s 10-room condominium, which features a 30-foot-wide living room with fireplace and four terraces overlooking Central Park at East 86th Street, went into contract Thursday for a bit under the final $12.95 million asking price, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The lessons from this transaction are many:
1) Tax the rich too much and they leave town (and the state).
2) When a big, expensive sale like this takes place, the City and State reap the benefits of TRANSFER TAXES…in this case over $ 300,000.00. (Two brokers also each made somewhere in the vicinity of $ 300,000 in commissions….that income is taxed too.)
3) Sales like this help the economy; we seriously doubt anyone with remotely good taste will keep the interior of this apartment in tact, so a million dollar plus renovation will fuel sales of interior design products, jobs and sales tax coffers.
4) More telling may be the fact that while this building has a Fifth Avenue address, it is not in fact a Fifth Avenue building…..it actually sits on 86th street and does not front 5th Avenue…it’s about 100ft from 5th Avenue (which in snob-world is the equivilent of a foreign zip code) So maybe Rush’s claims to be living on Fifth Avenue were as accurate as some of the Limbaugh observations/comments/monologues?
5) Rush should send all over-taxed New Yorkers a THANK YOU note as the value of his property more than doubled since he bought it in 1986. So while he complained that high taxation destroys economies, here is an example of how high taxes have actually kept New York’s real estate very valuable in these tough economic times…and made Rush a pretty penny. Maybe he just wanted to cash out before capital gains taxes go up?
6) We would guess that while Rush complains about rising taxes, as a percentage he probably pays less than half of what his listerners pay in taxes.
Liberace would be proud of you, Rush!