Good news. Escape from New York is happening ahead of schedule.

This brave new socialist world we’re living in is going to be awesome. Once we get rid of all the cows and the planes, we can build a wall to stop people from escaping from New York.

Last week, I covered New York’s economic disaster in Venezuela on the Hudson.

With 40,000 wealthy taxpayers covering half the taxes, that’s an even bigger issue for the city whose politics Cortez has carpetbagged her way into with socialist selfies and a dumb smirk.

Those 632,162 government employees are being carried by 40,000 taxpayers, many of whom have been joining Alexandria’s mother in Florida which has a higher population, but 200,000 fewer gov employees.

The most expensive thing about government employees isn’t when they’re working, it’s when they’re not. New York City has $142 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. It’s on the hook for $100 billion in retiree health care benefits with only $5 billion to show for it. 

As those people flee, New York is doing what every Communist system eventually does. Stop people from escaping.

But the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance is making sure that high earners who try to leave don’t escape without an audit and a bill. New York conducted about 3,000 “nonresidency” audits a year between 2010 and 2017, collecting around $1 billion, according to Monaeo, a company that sells an app for tracking and proving tax residency.

More than half of those who were audited lost their cases, and the average collected by New York State between 2015 and 2017 was $144,270 per audit, Monaeo said. In addition to the traditional audit methods the state uses to make sure a taxpayer isn’t gaming the system — like checking taxpayer’s credit card bills and travel schedules — New York officials are using a whole new set of high-tech tools, including tracking cellphone records, social media feeds, and veterinary and dentist records. Auditors are even conducting in-home inspections to look inside taxpayers’ refrigerators.

“If you’re a high earner in New York and you move to Florida, your chances of a residency audit are 100 percent,” said Barry Horowitz, a partner at the WithumSmith+Brown accounting firm. “New York has always been aggressive. But it’s getting worse.”

When the Maduro regime in Venezuela falls, its enforcers can get new jobs working for New York’s government. Or, soon, California’s narcosocialist regime.