Loves welfare, hates paying taxes
General Electric and Andrew Cuomo have been sitting in a tree for quite some time (
about $466,000 in campaign contributions worth of sitting in a tree). They've been k-i-s-s-i-n-g
in that tree as well.
Cuomo, who is anything but shy about spending money in the name of so-called economic development, has jumped at the chance to cut a deal. Through an aide, he dispatched an offer to GE in early June, before the tax hikes had even been put to a vote.
The governor himself quietly paid a courting call in Fairfield late last month. He declined to give the specifics of what was discussed, other than to say, “A lot of love is on the table, I want you to know.”[emphasis mine]
Eh, gross? Well, Cuomo wants to put a ring on it and announced as much. Cuomo says that it only took $50,000,000 in taxpayer subsidies to
convince GE to move back to New York.
It took $50 million in taxpayer subsidies to convince the company to build a new manufacturing facility in upstate New York, but this was money well spent, Cuomo asserted, noting that GE used to be “such a big part of this community and provided so many jobs and was such a vital player in this community.” Cuomo is now pushing to authorize an additional, undisclosed amount to entice GE to also relocate its corporate headquarters from Connecticut back to New York, some 40 years after it left. [emphasis mine]
Andrew Cuomo—asshat. Well, business needs those enticements, you gotta give a little to
make a little, right?
But this raises another issue: While New York’s corporate tax rates are lower than Connecticut’s (and, thanks to Cuomo, declining still further in 2016), its income taxes are another story.
The top rate here is 8.82%, compared to 6.7% in the Nutmeg State. For Immelt’s salary and bonus alone, that two-point difference translates to roughly $250,000 per year in extra taxes he would owe to Albany. How much would Cuomo have to give GE to make that hit worth Immelt’s while?
I don't get it?
Remember, what’s slated to possibly move is just GE’s corporate headquarters, with about 800 jobs. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but a fraction of the 9,000 GE employees already located at seven New York facilities.
On the plus side, HQ jobs tend to be high-paid. CEO Jeff Immelt, for example, made almost $19 million in total compensation for 2014, including $11.6 million in salary and bonus.
Oh, I get it. Anything else we
should know about GE?
Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric (GE) dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River. The source of the PCB discharges was two GE capacitor manufacturing plants located in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, New York, about 50 miles north of Albany. GE’s PCBs are now found in sediment, water and wildlife throughout the Hudson River ecosystem as far south as the New York Harbor. They are also found in people.
On May 15, 2009, after decades of debate, advocacy and negotiations, GE began Phase 1 of the long-delayed clean-up of those PCBs. Phase 1 dredging was scheduled to run for approximately 6 months in the upper Hudson and remove approximately 10% of the PCBs slated to be removed. Phase 2 will remove most of remaining targeted contaminants and operate for several years.
I grew up in New York City, in Washington Heights, by the Hudson. GE is the main reason I never set foot into the river. If you touched the Hudson River water as a kid, your friends told you to set your hand on fire since that was preferable to the poison death of the river. Read more of the David Sirota article
here as he gets into Cuomo and GE's lame attempts to gouge the tax payer and not fulfill their environmental duties.
GE says they're done cleaning the PCBs. Can you eat the fish in the Hudson? If you're a man or a woman not of childbearing age you can roll the dice. Otherwise, don't eat the fish. Who eats fish out of a river anyway?