Upstate New York towns explore seceding to Pennsylvania

The incentive for trading states is financial.

(Image credit: CC BY: jimmywayne)

published 20 February 2015

Some 15 towns in New York's Broome, Delaware, Tioga, and Sullivan counties — areas located in and near the Southern Tier region bordering Pennsylvania — are looking into options for leaving New York to join their southern neighbor.

The motivation for secession is financial: New York has the harshest tax burden in the nation, and the state banned fracking in 2014. The Southern Tier has extensive deposits of oil shale, which before the ban were to have provided a much-needed economic boost for the area.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.