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New York City keeps making it harder to sign the front of a paycheck — and Comptroller Mark Levine’s latest report should scare everyone who cashes one.
Private employers shed roughly 23,000 jobs in September, while private employment outside healthcare and social assistance fell about 32,000 over the past year.
Government employment, meanwhile, grew by nearly 10,000 jobs, and healthcare and social assistance added almost 30,000.
It’s not sustainable for any city to rely on public-sector employment for its jobs.
This should make City Hall ask what it takes to get the private market hiring again.
Some of the report’s brightest numbers make that question harder to dodge.
Wall Street profits jumped 51% in the year’s first half, office leasing has strengthened, and hotel occupancy topped 90% in September.
Yet leisure and hospitality lost roughly 17,000 jobs over the year.
The tax burden
Undeniably, there’s money moving through New York: The challenge is getting more of it into New Yorkers’ wallets.
That requires businesses willing to gamble on another location, an expansion, another team or another shift.
For an owner weighing this question, the answer is brutally simple: Will the return justify the risk?
New York City loads the wrong side of that calculation.
The city levies a standard corporate income tax rate of 8.85%, with different rates for qualifying firms, on top of state and federal obligations.
Covered unincorporated businesses, including sole proprietorships and partnerships, instead face a 4% tax on taxable business income allocated to the city.
It also charges commercial rent tax: an effective 3.9% on covered commercial tenants’ base rent in Manhattan south of 96th Street.
Other roadblocks
The city takes a cut simply because a business rents space — before it makes a single sale.
For an entrepreneur considering another lease, that’s another expense the expansion must earn back on top of the investment.
And the tax bill is only part of the obstacle course.
City Hall’s own outreach effort, as part of Mayor Mamdani’s “OPEN for Business” initiative, identified some of the problems: Unclear compliance requirements and inconsistent enforcement set up expensive, infuriating roadblocks.
Now it’s time to make the bureaucracy move.
Paperwork doesn’t fill an order or serve a customer, but somebody still has to pay for the time it consumes.
And while Levine describes New York City as a “low-hire, low-fire” economy, that’s only half the story.
A business’ abandoned expansion never produces a layoff notice, but the missing jobs still impact the New Yorkers who might have filled them.
For Gotham to keep growing, New Yorkers need employers who can afford to sign the next paycheck.
Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at Manhattan Institute.