Pol - A stop Hillary missed on that listening tour

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NYPost

A STOP SHE MISSED ON THAT LISTENING TOUR Saturday,March 3,2001

Hillary Clinton wants to change the subject: She wants New Yorkers to turn away from the never-ending scandals orbiting herself and her family.

So she's introduced her first bill - a plan, she says, to aid the upstate economy.

Unfortunately, Hillary's legislative distraction only gives New Yorkers something new to worry about - namely, the economic damage her bill would cause.

Rather than embrace something like President Bush's plan to get New York more money by taking away less to begin with - i.e., tax cuts - Hillary wants to haul the cash off to Washington and let her and her we-know-what's-best-for-you friends dribble a little bit back.

She claims Washington could spend millions of dollars in poor cities where job growth has been sluggish - including a few in upstate New York.

But as Clinton's predecessor in the Senate, the esteemed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has long been pointing out, for every dollar Washington collects from New York, only 85 cents gets sent back.

"Sen. Clinton should [listen to] Moynihan, who understood the imbalance between what New York pays to the federal government in taxes and what they get back in federal spending programs," Assembly Minority Leader John Faso said. "The only sure way to address this disparity . . . is income tax cuts."

He's right.

Worse, Hillary only thinks she knows what's best for upstate New York.

She'd offer incentives to entice cities to issue new "technology" bonds.

Just what cities need: more debt. Residents can then be saddled with higher local taxes for years while they repay it.

More than half the jobs upstate are generated, directly or otherwise, by the manufacturing sector.

So why does Hillary's plan focus so narrowly on high-tech?

She'd spend millions here and millions there for research and development and incentives to create high-speed access to the Internet.

But it's hard to see how that would create very many jobs anytime soon for the manufacturing-based region.

And she'd offer new small-businesses tax credits of up to $3,000 for each employee they hire. Existing businesses will just love to see their competition come in and get subsidies to lure away their workers.

Fortunately, Hillary is 97th in Senate seniority at the moment - and a member of the minority party. So her "plan" amounts to just so much hot air anyway.

But it isn't amazing how little she knows?

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001


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