Cuomo aide pushes back against Trump’s Upstate comments
The Cuomo administration pushed back Friday on disparaging comments by President Donald Trump, saying the president is just wrong about the economy of Upstate New York and suggesting that people who would heed his advice and leave the region in search of better jobs in other states “might have to turn left and keep traveling south across his border wall into Mexico.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo Senior Advisor John Maggiore was responding to comments Trump made at the White House on Wednesday when
the president told reporters that Upstate residents have “been treated very badly,” and said “if New York isn’t gonna treat them better, I would recommend they go to another state where they can get a job.”
“I woke up yesterday morning and was reading my online papers and my blood was boiling and steam was shooting out of my ears,” said Maggiore. “The president was describing a region that I don’t know.”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard a president of the United States tell an entire region to pack up and move,” said Maggiore. “It’s not reflective of what we’re seeing and it’s not reflected by the actual statistics.
Maggiore said unemployment and job creation statistics paint a very different picture than what the president suggested in his remarks.
Unemployment rates in the Hudson Valley, which stood at 7.3 percent when Cuomo took office in 2010 have dropped to 3.3 percent as of 2017 and some 84,000 private sector jobs have been created since 2010.
Despite the president’s claims, he said, the population
increases in New York have exceeded population increases in most other states outside the Sunbelt states.
“In Ulster County, the good news is deeper than that,” he said, adding that the population of millennials has increased 11.2 percent between 2010 and 2017.
“We see this all across Upstate New York where young people are moving back, especially to counties that have a city center … like the city of Kingston,” he said.
Beyond the statistics, Maggiore said, all one has to do is walk down the streets of any community to see the new life being breathed back into those communities.
“This is where young people are moving and the businesses are following,” he said.
Maggiore conceded that much of the region still faces challenges, but said the reality of the Upstate economy “is very, very different than what the president is implying.”
“It has nothing to do with reality,” he said.
Wednesday was not the first time that Trump has disparaged Upstate New York.
He made similar comments in 2017, when he said in the Wall Street Journal that residents in “upper” New York should leave their houses and move to places like Wisconsin for jobs at a Foxconn plant had been that he boasted would bring at least 10,000 new jobs to the state. According to reports, the company has actually created only 178 jobs to date and has been forced to forego millions of dollars in tax incentives.