E.J. McMahon

A quick trip into the counterfactual: Let’s say Mayor Michael Bloomberg meets Governor Eliot S  read more »

E.J. McMahon's Empire Center for New York State Policy just tossed up on its Web site a lovely gift to political reporters and junkies: A complete list, obtained via FOIL request, of legislative pork, known in Albany as "member items."

The list, the release notes, includes 83 Little League grants in 2005 alone. (And you know what those Little Leaguers do with the money!)

More to come when I'm off deadline and have a chance really to read the list.

The Manhattan Institute released a pair of studies today, which illustrate a central weirdness about this election: the most coherent attacks on Mike come from the right, but conservatives don't really have a candidate. One piece, by Nicole Gelinas, takes on "The Limits of Pragmatism" and basically argues that New York needs a revolution, not just competent management. Crunching the numbers, she says that Mike has actually kept spending growth below inflation for most what he can control (education is the exception) but argues that without major changes -- like closing public hospitals and convincing the state to cut health benefits for the poor -- all he's doing is tinkering at the margins.

E.J. McMahon, meanwhile, has another round of tallying the size of New York City's tax burden, which he rates the highest of any city in the nation. One thing that I always quibble with in pieces like this is the attempt to tie job-losses, say in the early 1990s, entirely to tax increases, rather than to broader economic forces. But McMahon is extremely convincing on one thing: that the city's tax structure is utterly "Byzantine," particularly when it comes to property taxation.  read more »

Both writers seem to think that more tax hikes are basically inevitable.

McMahon also opens reminding readers of a quote that is, depending on whom you ask, Mike's most revealing, perceptive, or wrong-headed: his assertion to a group of corporate executives that New York City is a "luxury product."

The folks over at the liberal Drum Major Institute seem to have enjoyed the Times's story today on the Manhattan Institute's waning local influence, and add their own slap:

"Certainly the Manhattan Institute has sensed a political opportunity to stir up xenophobia in the absence of contributing to a meaningful conversation about immigration policy in this country in this country. Maybe that's why Mayor Bloomberg doesn't listen to them. The scarier question for thoughtful Americans is: who still is?"  read more »

This seems rather unfair to Tamar Jacoby, but in any case, the Manhattan Institute's position reflects the uncomfortable one a lot of national conservative think tanks have been thrust into: what happens when your team wins, then betrays you? Some, like E.J. McMahon locally and the CATO Institute in Washington, haven't let loyalty get in the way of their politics. Others have.

It's something of a surprise to me that the Manhattan Institute, in general, hasn't quite managed to get traction with its critiques of the Bloomberg administration. They have to take some of the blame for the fact that no serious conservative challenge to Mike ever emerged.

We're honestly not sure if Adriano Espaillat is joking here, but E.J. McMahon has turned up a bill from the Manhattan Assemblyman and Beep candidate that would set a minimum wage for stand-up comics.

From the sponsor's memo:  read more »

"Often comedians in the New York City area are paid approximately $20,000 per year. Often times these comedians work in various parts of the City within a short time frame making the use of a taxi service a necessity. They are not compensated for travel and often are not provided with benefits from the contracting entity. Therefore it appears that $20,000 a year may not be an adequate salary to live in the city of New York."

McMahon adds: "For purposes of the Espaillat bill, a 'standup comedian' would be defined as 'a professional performer who has worked a minimum of two hundred performance hours telling jokes and/or performing comedy at a comedy club or other place of entertainment where people watch and/or listen to such performances.' (Unfortunately, the bill does not require that such performers actually be funny.)"

Freddy's stock transfer tax plan is sort of lying in tatters at the moment, the general sense being that it's a totally unnecessary item with the side-effect of triggering the apocalypse.

We were always a bit confused by Freddy's court order bit, but there's a basic honesty to his plan: as the Sun has been saying forever, a multi-billion dollar schools settlement will require a huge tax hike of some kind, and city taxpayers pay state taxes too.

Anyway, in very partial defense of Freddy, we have yet to see anybody take on his strongest argument for the tax: that the London Stock Exchange has a bigger one, and is thriving. We were kind of disappointed to see the usually-sharp Nicole Gelinas (she of the great "No Job for a Hack" column) write a boilerplate dismissal of the tax today, ignoring the London argument.

It seems like a fair point. Nicole? E.J.?  read more »

UPDATE: The Manhattan Institute's E.J. McMahon rises to the bait: "Hey, no fair! 'Anonymous' in your comments box stole my answer, to whit: While you could avoid the NY tax simply by moving across state lines, you can't dodge the London duty by moving to, say, Manchester -- although many of the guys in London have found other ways around it. I thought Nicole's piece was just fine. I mean, how clever and novel do you expect someone to be in criticizing an idea that's so patently dumb?"