Democratic Governor Patterson of NY seems to understand the economy better than Republicans

Can we get this guy to switch sides of the aisle?

New York state also faces a $12.5 billion deficit in 2009, and the Democratic governor has said he would ask labor unions to forgo 3% raises called for by contracts that would have to be renegotiated. But Gov. Paterson has rejected calls for higher taxes on the wealthy — unlike New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has proposed tax increases.
“[T]he higher we tax even the wealthy, the more we lose population and the less job creation there is,” Gov. Paterson said in an interview Friday. “We’re pretty resigned to the fact that we’re going to have to do this with spending cuts.”
New York’s governor blames the state’s current shortfall, in part, on its failure to better manage revenue during the years of soaring Wall Street profits. “What’s actually more embarrassing than the fact that we have such a huge deficit now, when bonuses are down and capital gains are down, is the fact that when there was…wealth, we overspent,” says Gov. Paterson.

New York is facing an absolute nightmare with the poor performance on Wall Street. Firms like Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch used to pick up the tax tab by paying high taxes on high returns. Now the NY is screwed….

But New York finds itself in a particularly perilous spot because of its increasingly heavy reliance on the financial sector as its tax base. This summer, Gov. Paterson offered a stark example of the challenges: The top 16 banks paid $173 million of state taxes in June 2007, but that number fell to just $5 million this past June. And the financial sector generates one in five state tax dollars today, up from just 3% of state tax revenue in 1980.

I used to think Bloomberg was someone to consider for national office, but he keeps moving farther and farther left.

Mr. Bloomberg — who recently secured a term-limits exception so he can run for mayor again in 2009 — has said it will be a “number of years” before the city’s banking sector starts paying taxes again, and he has budgeted zero tax liability for the industry for the next two years. To close a two-year, $4 billion gap, he has floated increasing New York City’s sales tax by 3% and the income tax by 15%. That would raise the top marginal rate for city and state taxes, already the highest in the nation, to more than 11%.

This mess is going to be felt all over the country, not just in NY.