Spending Like A Drunken Liberal - Other People's Money

Once again the thug stuck his paws into the cookie jar. Did I say thug? Pardon me, I meant incompetent thug.

NY Gov. Andrew "Bite Me" Cuomo just pissed away tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to create less than 80 jobs.

You’ve seen Andrew Cuomo’s TV commercials, the ones that say, “The new New York is open. Open to innovation. Open to ambition. Open to bold ideas.” The spot is promoting the Start-Up NY program.

Now the results are starting to come in: 76 jobs so far.

In the entire state. From a program that has spent $28 million advertising its own existence.

That’s $368,000 per job.

Start-Up NY sounds great on its face. It’s a tax cut. Who could argue with that? The problem is that it’s a very, very narrow tax cut. It’s only for certain kinds of businesses that do certain kinds of things in certain areas of the state. Surprise: It’s had very narrow effects.

We'll need to get a list of Cuomo's friends who have benefited from this. 

The program is little more than a gimmick which seeks to mask New York’s status as one of the worst business environments and high tax quagmires in the nation. In order to make things look a bit less horrible than they are, the program offers a discount tax rate to new businesses and a variety of other investment incentives. The main problem with this scheme is that these benefits are very much temporary, and assuming your business does manage to somehow survive for a few years you are lumped right back in with everyone else after that and pay the crippling state rate. Further, the smaller communities which “benefit” from these programs see only a handful of jobs out of it (as noted above) while having to make up the shortfall in their local budgets by taxing the residents all the harder.