Not So Sunny In Western NY, Senator Clinton

As a discussion and debate topic, the upstate economy finally is getting its due. Statewide and local candidates and residents are talking about it — and occasionally going overboard, as seen and heard in a speech from a local businessman last week....Upstate's decline seems more stark as nation forges ahead, Editorial, Democrat & Chronicle, 10/23/2006

If you don't live in New York State, you haven't seen the sunny advertisements for Senator Clinton, which talk sweetly about the jobs and the money she's "created." If you live in western New York, or travel there often, as the writer does, the beautiful New York changes her ad campaign depicts are pure fantasy. It's not surprising she wouldn't want to talk about this much, though she did in 2000 when she first ran for the Senate. Tax policies in New York, as noted below, have worked powerfully against any hopes of redeveloping both small and medium cities. People can't afford the property taxes and don't want to move there. For companies who might find the truly beautiful landscapes, not to mention the easy availability of tens of thousands of college graduates from the area each year, the tax problem in New York State is even worse. The most likely corporate campaign for the past thirty years has been to move elsewhere. Even Kodak, a stalwart in Rochester for a century, has outsourced almost everything it sells, especially since the dramatic decline of sales for cameras that use film. Kodak, which financed a huge portion of the arts scene in Rochester, including its symphony, has been withdrawing corporate grants that had been assumed as normal procedure for fifty years. If the attitude among Albany legislators, not to mention two very liberal, tax & spend liberals as U.S. Senators, is that sharing wealth is more important than making it, decline is what happens to any area. This won't help John Spencer, tax-cutting, budget-cutting, and very successful former mayor of Yonkers, who's running a futile campaign against Senator Clinton, not only in the estimate of voters but in that of the RNC. Spencer has become the unacknowledged Republican presence in the election. What a pity. But this won't change as long as New York State voters give credibility to a press and to a political elite that won't acknowledge a simple fact: the larger a government's share of economic activity is, the less wealth will be generated. A thought for the coming election....

Luther