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The coronavirus crisis has forced more than 100,000 small businesses in New York to close permanently, the governor said Friday. The huge swath of closures means main streets will look at lot different when the state is allowed to reopen.

At most risk have been businesses that are owned by minorities, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
"Small businesses are taking a real beating," he said. "They are 90 percent of New York's businesses and they're facing the toughest challengers.

"The economic projections, vis-a-vis small business, are actually frightening. More than 100,000 have shut permanently since the pandemic hit. Many small businesses just don't have the staying power to continue to pay all the fixed costs, the lease, etcetera, when they have no income whatsoever."

All but essential businesses have now been closed since New York's shutdown started on March 22. Millions of former employees are now registered as unemployed.

Lack of opportunity in NYS

From the Daily News:

New York has the bleakest economic outlook of any state in the nation, a report released Wednesday found.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative-leaning think tank, made the dire assessment in its annual “Rich States, Poor States” study — blaming New York’s high taxes. It was the fifth time in the last six years that New York ranked 50th in the annual study.

From Capital New York:

Companies participating in the state's Start-Up NY program created a total of 76 jobs last year in exchange for $56,650 in tax benefits, according to a report on the program's inaugural year of operation.

Governor Andrew Cuomo has often touted the program, which creates tax-free zones rooted in university campuses, for its promised job creation and investment numbers offered by the accepted companies. The report issued this week by Empire State Development is the first time the Start Up-NY's actual numbers have been documents.

The 54 companies approved last year by E.S.D.—33 of which are new to New York—have thus far created 76 of the 2,085 jobs they promised. The companies also promised $91.3 million in investment, and have so far delivered on $1.7 million of that, according to the report. Those numbers translate to 3.6 percent of the promised jobs, and 1.9 percent of the promised investment.

Newsflash: The economy still sucks

From Yahoo:

The recession put a 3.1 percent dent in the personal incomes of New York state residents, who endured their first full-year decline in more than 70 years, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Paychecks or net earnings tumbled 5.4 percent, while dividends, interest and rent slid 8.4 percent, to a grand total of nearly $908 billion, the state comptroller's report said.

Not only did New Yorkers' personal incomes fall "almost twice" as much as they did in the nation as a whole, but they have yet to recover to pre-recession levels, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said.

The drop occurred even though the job-destroying recession was milder in New York than in the rest of the country. One reason for the hit to New Yorker's pocketbooks is Wall Street's dominance among the state's employers; pay and job security are often highly volatile in the securities industry.

After the securities industry lost a record $54 billion in the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, federal bailouts and low interest rates helped it achieve record profits in 2009 of $61.4 billion, DiNapoli said.

This year, the companies' first-quarter profits of $10.1 billion were more than twice the $3.9 billion total in the second quarter -- but the more recent earnings were "in line with historic levels," DiNapoli said.

Though Wall Street went on a bit of a hiring spree in early 2010, these employers, whose earnings drive the city and state economies, have gone back to handing out pink slips, he said.

Globalism hurting American workers

From The Business Insider:

The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Click the link to read the scary stats...

Bloomberg's economic record is mediocre

From the Gotham Gazette:

Boom and bust still characterize the local economy, and despite many ways in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg's tenure has been an improvement over Guiliani's record, his economic leadership similarly has fallen short in ensuring that the benefits of growth are more broadly shared. He has refused to advocate for better wages, missed a major opportunity to curtail the use of property tax breaks and hasn't re-oriented the investment of city economic development resources away from real estate toward human capital.

First, a few indicators of how the local economy has changed.

* During the mayor's time in office, the city has seen a net gain of 107,000 private sector jobs. However, all of this net gain occurred in the not-for-profit sector (educational, health and social services).

* The for-profit private sector lost a net of 2,600 jobs from the middle of the previous recession to the middle of the current one.

* There has been a pronounced shift within the for-profit sector, with the city losing middle-wage jobs in information, manufacturing and wholesale trade, and gaining jobs in lower-paying industries such as food service, retail, and arts and entertainment.

* In recent decades, inflation-adjusted family incomes at the peak of the cycle almost always exceeded those at the high point of the previous cycle. Not this time, and not in New York City: Family incomes in 2008 were no higher than in 2000, the peak of the previous cycle.

* The typical worker in New York City saw a 5 percent drop in inflation-adjusted hourly pay from 2002 to 2008. Meanwhile, the bulk of income gains accrued to the wealthiest 5 percent of the city population.