gcatt, Sun, May 4th, 2008
Here's another reason to hate New York. Despite the bloated promises from the scalawags on both sides of the political spectrum, the state is a mess. It was mess before Paterson. It was a mess before Spitzer, Pataki, and the prince of inflated sanctimony, Mario Cuomo. Each has promised "change." Each has failed to deliver what New Yorkers need: A simpler, less intrusive, less expensive government.
This is due mostly to various overheated pronouncements and promises. Could anything be kookier than the Upstate Economic Czar? That was Spitzer's panacea for Upstaters.
"Oooo. Spitzer knows we exist." We oozed anticipatory sweat as Client #9 put us on Cloud...oh, never mind.
So now, in the midst of Paterson's litany of things he's going to do, beyond sleep in this own bed with his wife, we find that he wants to attach New York's tentacles to sales made on the Internet. There's a clutch of reasons that supporters of this stupidity offer to pursue a new raid on our pocketbooks. Chief of among them is poor, beleaguered small business owners who must, by law, collect state and local sales taxes amounting to over 8 percent in most cases. That's opposed to Internet merchants like Amazon which collect no sales tax, but do charge substantially for shipping in most cases. Pretty much a pocketbook wash, if you ask me.
Small businesses experience financial challenges not from the Internet but by a despotic state legislature beset by Balkan principles and narcissistic arrogance. That means stupid regulations; exploitive taxation and a bureaucracy that oversees this effort with with the cruel zeal of a Russian apparatchik.
There's hope, however, that this last frontier without New York's avarice my survive. Amazon has filed suit to stop the money grab by New York. And, if you're an optimist like me, the Amazon challenge on Constitutional grounds looks pretty good. But then there's hundreds of thousands of dollars the legislature and Paterson will spend defending this flaccid idea to stick it to us once again.
