Has Patterson gone mad (Albany, Hope: buying, luxury, wage)

[tom bates]

Remember the effect of the Dems' "luxury tax" on yachts, etc., in 1993? Amazingly, "the rich" stopped buying them (never saw THAT coming!) and almost all of the skilled MIDDLE CLASS workers in the US who build them lost their jobs! The private sector giveth and the govt taketh away. One of many . Ask Herbert Hoover and esp FDR how brilliant it is to wage economic warfare on productive people in downturns so they can't sanely hire anyone. Who's going to risk an investment to build a factory, etc, if the govt will steal all their profits and "hire" a million people to ***** in lightbulbs and another million to unscrew them 100 times a day? A whopping 521 job cuts, huh? Not even 10% of Spitzer's addition to an already obscenely bloated state payroll. Fire 2 or 3 million as a starting point, then maybe NY can again HOPE to have a remotely competitive.

[Fred314X]

If they eliminated waste (to say nothing of pet, porkbarrel projects) none of this would have to happen. But, of course, we're talking about Albany. Can't expect much else from them. Hopefully, people will have all this in mind when candidates for the state legislature are up for re-election.