The results of this week’s Georgia Senate runoffs, assuring Democrats will soon control both houses of Congress, as well as the White House, had to come as a huge relief to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo spent the last nine months assuming, expecting and finally hoping desperately for a fresh multibillion-dollar infusion of unrestricted federal aid — on top of billions already steered to the Empire State by a $2 trillion federal CARES Act stimulus last March.
Sen. Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans had dug in against “blue-state bailouts.” If the GOP had retained a Senate majority, New York’s Democratic governor would have been forced to confront a fiscal crisis made worse by his delaying tactics since the pandemic began to unfold.
But based on the governor’s sour tone the day after Tuesday’s elections, you would never have guessed he had just heard very good news. In remarks that would soon be overshadowed by the Capitol riot, Cuomo claimed federal policies since 2016 amounted to “theft” from the Empire State, turning New Yorkers into “crime victims” entitled to compensation from the feds.
The governor turned his ire against a favorite target: President Trump’s tax-reform law, enacted at the tail end of 2017.
Cuomo asserted that the new tax law “raised our property taxes $4 billion per year” and “an average family’s property taxes . . . [by] $2,600 per year for three years.” He went on to claim that the tax bill had “cost New Yorkers $30 billion” in “pure cash” over the last three years. “We now have a $15 billion deficit,” he added. “They took $30 billion. At a minimum we need to get $15 billion this year to cover our deficit.”
All of which was — and is — simply untrue.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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E.J. McMahon is a senior fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy and a Manhattan Institute adjunct fellow. Follow him on Twitter here.
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