One of the ironies of recent history is that although politicians from the rest of the New York State routinely accused New York City of draining their communities through wasteful government spending and a welfare culture, a charge dating back to the administration of Mayor Lindsay and the annual tin cup pilgrimage to Albany, the reality has been nearly the reverse. During the Pataki Administration and after, in fact, local government employment in the rest of the state soared. Even as the independent economic base of Upstate New York, Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley – in manufacturing, corporate headquarters and high tech companies such as IBM and Grumman, withered away. During the darkest days of the New York City economy, someone like Bella Abzug might have suggested making up for lost private sector jobs by just giving people more government jobs, so they could have unlimited health insurance and early retirement pensions, and making someone else pay for it. But the rest of New York State has seemingly tried to actually pull that off, burdening the remaining private sector employers there, New York City, and – through debts and deferred pension costs – the future. This trend was relentless and seemed to go on and on regardless of economic cycles.
Starting in 2009, however, it shuddered to a halt and began to reverse. Have the policies of Governor Andrew Cuomo stopped the trend? Has the burden on the private sector in the rest of the state reached breaking point? Or have the costs from the past finally caught up with the local government growth machine? You can review the data on "Saying the Unsaid in New York."