Neil deMause

As part of City Limits’ series on what New York is getting itself in for with its next governor, I look at Carl Paladino and Andrew Cuomo’s job-development plans (but mostly Cuomo’s, because Paladino had to leave the story early to go to the bathroom):

If the seven-member comedy act that was the October 18 gubernatorial debate can be said to have had a serious message, it was likely this: It’s the jobs, stupid. Amid the prostitution jokes, one of the most pressing questions of the night was how New York’s next governor plans to address an economic future that looks, by anyone’s reckoning, bleak.

Neither Andrew Cuomo nor Carl Paladino returned multiple requests for comment, but both have issued statements or proposals that provide insight into their plans… [read more]

I went to a city hearing on giving tax breaks to an alleged union-busting firm for new office space, and more or less lived to tell the tale:

Meetings of the Industrial Development Agency – the city agency in charge of approving discretionary tax subsidies to local businesses – are generally sleepy affairs. Unless sports teams are involved, the monthly board meetings typically attract a handful of business executives and policy wonks but little public attention.

This morning’s monthly IDA hearing, though, was widely anticipated for a different reason: One of the items on the agenda was $24 million in sales tax breaks on office and building materials to Thomson Reuters, the news-and-information-services giant created when the Canadian firm Thomson bought the wire service Reuters in 2008… [read more]