Welcome to New York… That’s what my property tax bill might
have said when we moved back to our home state.
My taxes are higher than my mortgage payments.
I suppose that may or not be true for every resident of the
state. However, this much is true: New York has the highest tax burden and the secondhighest amount of public debt per capita in the country. So, despite taking more of my income than any
other state, our government can’t seem to improve its balance sheet.
All of this was rolling around in the back of my mind while
I was listening to one of my favorite talk shows on public radio. At noon each weekday, Evan Dawson
interrogates reality on WXXI, our local NPR affiliate. He is incisive and upbeat. Listening to his show is a great way to learn
about our community – locally, nationally and globally.
Last Tuesday’s show featured University of Rochester
President Joel Seligman and others leading an initiative to “win” one of three
$500 Million economic development “prizes” being offered by the state
government and touted by our governor, Andrew Cuomo, as part of his commitment
to upstate New York.
I came away impressed by Seligman and his colleagues and
feeling that our endeavor was in good hands.
But, here’s the question no one bothers to ask… Why are competing to “win” back our own
money?
The very idea that we should compete for the benefit of tax
dollars is appalling.
And, if we “win” (I can’t seem to stop myself from putting
the word in quotes), the governor will no doubt show up in town and act like he
is doing us a big, fat favor.
He’s done it before.
During his reelection campaign, he designated $3 Million to the
environmental cleanup of a new commercial development in a nearby Finger Lakes
community and then declared that it was the kind of “investment” the state would make “all day long”, as though he was doing us a big, fat favor.
No doubt the project will create some construction jobs for
the duration of the project. And, no
doubt the resulting development will provide some retail and service jobs for the
longer term. However, the $3 Million
goes into the pockets of the already wealthy real estate owners and developers
driving the project.
Thanks for the big, fat favor, Andy.
This paradigm is so ingrained in the public mind that no one
even questions it anymore.
The mentality also affects our thinking in other
endeavors. The state takes some of our
tax dollars and gives it back to the school districts that educate our children. Now, the governor – in an apparent effort to
make scapegoats of teachers – is specifying how they should be evaluated.
Whether you agree with his ideas on how to evaluate teachers
of not, you have to wonder why our money has to go to Albany so that some group
of bureaucrats can decide how our school systems should be managed.
There is a financial cost to sending money to a central
government (economists call it ‘agency cost’).
And, there is a non-financial cost to our community to placing our
future in the hands of people who don’t live here and are subject to political
and social agendas that don’t necessarily serve our local interests.
It’s time to place these events in perspective. Our high taxes and bureaucracy have cost us
jobs and endangered the future of the (once) Empire State. Local employers who have the resources often
invest in projects to expand their businesses in other states. Others have left the state completely. Meanwhile, a recent study has judged New York to be one of the hardest states in the nation to start a small business.
If the governor wants to do us a big, fat favor, he could
start by eliminating a bloated state bureaucracy and lowering our tax bill so
we don’t have to compete to “win” back something that was ours to begin with.
Then he can stop doing us big, fat favors.
WHO WILL LEAD?
