Politics on the Hudson

OK, so New York has more government workers, proportionately, than North Carolina. After all, we have New York City, for better or worse, and they don’t, and that must explain the discrepancy.

At least, that was the reaction of some people when they learned that New York State has 63 state and local-government workers per 1,000 population, compared to 59 in North Carolina.

That was one of the facts gleaned from census data by E.J. McMahon of Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center (and not the Fiscal Policy Institute, as  we erroneously said yesterday) to help explain why property taxes are so much higher in the Empire State than the Tarheel state.

But hold on. Common wisdom is once again wrong. David Shaffer of SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute reported on the NYfiscalwatch.org web site that the ratio of government workers to the whole population in New York City (one to 17) is actually a little lower than in the rest of the state (one to 16).

“Apparently the large and relatively unified local government structure in New York City achieves some economies of scale that are foreign to the vast and overlapping array of localities outside the city,’’ he wrote on the web site.

He pointed out that finding seems to strengthen the point that “government payrolls in New York seems disproportionately large, compared to North Carolina.’‘

There. Now the question is, what, if anything, should be done about it?