{"id":381394,"date":"2026-10-24T03:12:34","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T03:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/381394\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T03:12:34","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T03:12:34","slug":"city-comptroller-mark-levines-report-reveals-the-damage-the-private-sector-industry-has-suffered-across-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/381394\/","title":{"rendered":"City Comptroller Mark Levine\u2019s report reveals the damage the private sector industry has suffered across NYC"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City keeps making it harder to sign the front of a paycheck \u2014 and Comptroller Mark Levine\u2019s latest report<\/a> should scare everyone who cashes one.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Government employment, meanwhile, grew by nearly 10,000 jobs, and healthcare and social assistance added almost 30,000.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not sustainable for any city to rely on public-sector employment for its jobs.<\/p>\n

This should make City Hall<\/a> ask what it takes to get the private market hiring again.<\/p>\n

Some of the report\u2019s brightest numbers make that question harder to dodge.<\/p>\n

Wall Street profits jumped 51% in the year\u2019s first half, office leasing has strengthened, and hotel occupancy topped 90% in September.<\/p>\n

Yet leisure and hospitality lost roughly 17,000 jobs over the year.<\/p>\n

The tax burden<\/p>\n

Undeniably, there\u2019s money moving through New York: The challenge is getting more of it into New Yorkers\u2019 wallets.<\/p>\n

That requires businesses willing to gamble on another location, an expansion, another team or another shift.<\/p>\n

For an owner weighing this question, the answer is brutally simple: Will the return justify the risk?<\/p>\n

New York City loads the wrong side of that calculation.<\/p>\n

The city levies a standard corporate income tax<\/a> rate of 8.85%, with different rates for qualifying firms, on top of state and federal obligations.<\/p>\n

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Covered unincorporated businesses, including sole proprietorships and partnerships, instead face a 4% tax on taxable business income allocated to the city.<\/p>\n

It also charges commercial rent tax<\/a>: an effective 3.9% on covered commercial tenants\u2019 base rent in Manhattan south of 96th Street.<\/p>\n

Other roadblocks<\/p>\n

The city takes a cut simply because a business rents space \u2014 before it makes a single sale.<\/p>\n

For an entrepreneur considering another lease, that\u2019s another expense the expansion must earn back on top of the investment.<\/p>\n

And the tax bill is only part of the obstacle course.<\/p>\n

City Hall\u2019s own outreach effort, as part of Mayor\u00a0Mamdani\u2019s \u201cOPEN for Business\u201d initiative, identified some of the problems: Unclear compliance requirements and inconsistent enforcement set up expensive, infuriating roadblocks.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s time to make the bureaucracy move.<\/p>\n

Paperwork doesn\u2019t fill an order or serve a customer, but somebody still has to pay for the time it consumes.<\/p>\n

And while Levine describes New York City as a \u201clow-hire, low-fire\u201d economy<\/a>, that\u2019s only half the story.<\/p>\n

A business\u2019 abandoned expansion never produces a layoff notice, but the missing jobs still impact the New Yorkers who might have filled them.<\/p>\n

For Gotham to keep growing, New Yorkers need employers who can afford to sign the next paycheck.<\/p>\n

Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City keeps making it harder to sign the front of a paycheck \u2014 and Comptroller Mark…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381395,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[302,9,24,55,54,56,299,2780,3417,82],"class_list":["post-381394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-city-hall","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-opinion","tag-taxes","tag-wall-street","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}