New York’s Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo is known for wasting taxpayer money. His latest case of reckless spending reinforces that well-deserved reputation.
Cuomo is being slammed in the press for his decision to dump $10 million in taxpayer money into a comedy club in upstate New York.
The club is three hours away from Ithaca and more than and six hours from New York City.
His justification? It will create “scores” of jobs. No number, not even a ballpark – just “scores”.
Sounds funny? It’s not.
It’s just the latest in a long line of Cuomo-backed, taxpayer funded waste.
Here's more, in National Review:
To mark the end of summer, New York’s governor is barbecuing $10 million in public funding as the state’s contribution toward construction of a comedy museum in Jamestown, N.Y. Jamestown? It’s a place of “empty storefronts and underused buildings,” according to the New York Times. It’s three hours west of Ithaca. Three hours north of Pittsburgh. Six and a half hours northwest of Manhattan. Home to some 31,000 souls, it doesn’t exactly scream “arts capital.” There’s a reason the most popular museums tend to be concentrated in cities rather than scattered randomly in rural areas, hamlets, and deserted islands: One museum, especially one small museum, isn’t usually enough to make tourists to go much out of their way. Especially a museum that proposes to offer stuff few want to see in the first place....
Cuomo’s comedy boondoggle is just the latest in a long series of desperate moves to conjure up jobs of dubious sustainability using bales of taxpayer money. Among his previous bets were $600 million to build a factory for an Austrian chip maker that bailed on the deal; $15 million for a film-production facility in Central New York that today stands empty; a tax break called Start-Up New York that has been credited with creating 408 jobs but spent $53 million on TV commercials alone; and a $750 million handout to billionaire Elon Musk’s money-losing panel manufacturer SolarCity for a forthcoming factory that supposedly will eventually create 5,000 jobs — at $150,000 for each of them. As each of these projects goes up in flames, an unchastened and perhaps unchastenable Cuomo dreams up more of them.
If all of that weren't enough, the New York Times also reports that the money for the "multimillion-dollar gamble that will test the power of giggles versus geography," is coming from a fund facing intense scrutiny already:
That money was part of the Buffalo Billion, the governor’s signature upstate economic development project, which has drawn critics and the attention of federal investigators; last fall, the United States attorney in Manhattan announced federal corruption charges against nine individuals associated with various projects around the state, including Mr. Cuomo’s longtime political enforcer, Joseph Percoco, who is to face trial in January. That scrutiny has not fazed Mr. Cuomo, who has doubled down on the Buffalo project, putting an additional $500 million toward its second phase.