False Hope for New York
15th September 2021
Leaders of New York City’s business community were heartened this week when Democratic mayoral nominee and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams came before them to promise that, under his administration, New York would “welcome business.” In keeping with his primary campaign rhetoric, Adams insisted that he would prevent the city from becoming “dysfunctional,” with a renewed focus on public safety.
These are welcome words. But a closer look at Adams’s campaign platform and long public record reveals a worrisome pattern of reversals, empty promises, and unfulfilled expectations that should at least temper voter optimism that New York City is turning a corner into sunshine.
For instance, while Adams vows to make New York City friendly to commerce, last year he co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing a radical new corporate tax on information. “Years of chronic underinvestment in education, health care, housing and transit,” he wrote, challenge the city “to find new revenue sources.” The obvious place to impose new taxes, according to Adams, “is the data economy.”
As long as New Yorkers keep electing Democrats, they’re going to keep crapping in their own lunch pail.