Spend even a little time in public life in the North Country and you’ll hear this argument: our taxes are so high because we’re sending money down to New York City to support all those people and the public services they consume.<\/p>\n
We’ve reported quite a bit over the years that it’s actually that opposite. As NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg testified in January<\/a>, NYC sends $11 billion more to Albany than it receives. And Queens lawmaker Peter Vallone, Jr., wants the City to secede from the state<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cEvery day we are given another reason to secede,\u201d he said, offering as but one example Albany\u2019s paralysis over a rescue plan for the city\u2019s transit system. The Legislature, he said, is \u201cprobably second only to Somalia when it comes to ineffectiveness.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As a lifelong Upstater, I’ve heard numerous calls for secession from our side. A friend of mine used to say, “I Love New York…but I draw the line at Yonkers.”<\/p>\n Do you think Upstate New York could survive as its own entity? Or do our fortunes rest in the five boroughs?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spend even a little time in public life in the North Country and you’ll hear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}