No bang for the bucks

Color us decidedly unimpressed by the early results of Start-Up NY, Gov. Cuomo’s marquee job-creation effort. Launched in 2014, the program offers extraordinary tax breaks to businesses that start or expand on designated college campuses. Accepted companies pay no business, sales or property taxes for 10 years. Employees are exempt from income taxes for five years, and pay nothing on their first $200,000 in income for the next five.

To market this, Cuomo has spent $53 million over the past 18 months on a national TV campaign.

Yet as of Dec. 31, the program had created just 76 jobs, with vows to create 2,000 more over the next five years.

Four hundred added jobs a year is better than none, but not by much.

Officials emphasize that the program didn’t accept applications until May, seven months after Cuomo started showing the TV spots. The state then needed time to review applications, and companies needed time to launch.

So far this year, they say, the number of enrolled businesses has grown from 54 to 93, and the total jobs commitments over five years has risen to 2,800. Applications from another 140 firms are either in the works or under review.

That’s a long way from jumpstarting New York’s economy — which the American Legislative Exchange Council recently rated as dead last on competitiveness among the 50 states.

Start-Up NY comes with painful tradeoffs. It waives taxes for a designated few while longstanding businesses and citizens pay the full freight in the nation’s most heavily taxed state.

With persistent economic weakness, especially upstate, Cuomo presented tax-free zones as part of a development strategy “on steroids.”

“They have to work,” Cuomo told the Daily News in October. “They are the least expensive places in the United States to site a business from a tax point of view. No sales tax, no income tax, no property tax. We’re marketing the hell out of them. I don’t know what else we can do.”

Maybe it’s time to look for a Plan B.