Steven Malanga has a piece in The Wall Street Journal about the city of Buffalo, New York. It’s a case study in how liberal policies ruin American cities. High taxes, subsidies and rich benefits to public employees is a recipe for disaster.
This is an old story for Buffalo. Ever since the city began losing its manufacturing base in the 1950s and gradually declined into one of America’s poorest cities (the poverty rate today is nearly 29%), the federal and state governments have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into subsidized redevelopment schemes that have yielded few tangible benefits.
Buffalo may be the paradigmatic example of why expensive government revitalization efforts often fail. Back in 2004, the Buffalo News estimated that the city had garnered more federal redevelopment aid per capita than any other city in the country, a total of more than half a billion dollars since the 1970s. Yet, the paper noted, the city had virtually nothing to show for the money.
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These massive investment subsidies failed partly because officials were ill-suited to select the right projects and often instead gave money to favored insiders. Even former Mayor Anthony Masiello described the federal government’s redevelopment funds as “a politically motivated system trying to please everybody.”But Buffalo also struggles because it remains among the highest-taxed localities in the country. According to Cato Institute scholar Dean Stansel, a Buffalo resident pays 25% more in income taxes than does the average resident in America’s 100 largest metro areas. Buffalo’s 8.75% sales tax, according to the Tax Foundation, is the fifth highest among the country’s 120 cities with more than 200,000 residents. And the property-tax burden in Buffalo and surrounding Erie County ranks in the top 10% nationwide.
There’s much more at the link, including how the Buffalo school district pays for elective plastic surgery for teachers. I guess they’ll look good for their taxpayer funded early retirements.
Unfortunately, the rest of the state isn’t far behind Buffalo when it comes to taxes, public employee benefits and unfunded mandates. Governor Cuomo might talk a good game, but he hasn’t done anything substantive to ease the burdens on New York’s cities, towns and counties.
Tags: Buffalo, liberal, mandates, new york, policies, ruined, taxes, unions
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