By Hank Russell
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman is facing criticism of his gubernatorial platform, saying he “has no plan” as governor and that his campaign platform is full of nothing but empty promises.
State Democrats cited an article from Politico which said that Blakeman “still hasn’t made it very clear what he’d do with the job.” Rather than “making detailed policy prescriptions,” according to the article, he has spent his time attacking his challenger, Governor Kathy Hochul, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, referring to them as “Comrade Kathy” and “Mamdani the Commie.”
On an August episode of PragerU’s The Brief with Shabbos Kestenbaum, Blakeman was asked how he would tackle the housing crisis. “Well. it’s not through socialism,” Blakeman replied. “That’s a failed system.”
The idea, Blakeman said, is “not to give people a free bus ride. The idea is to put more money into people’s pockets, give them better jobs, don’t tax them up to their throat and create an economic environment where businesses will want to create new jobs with higher wages and better benefits.”
“It’s by creating prosperity that you make it more affordable and people will have more money and they will get to choose how they spend their money rather than state and city governments,” Blakeman added. He also pledged not to implement taxes on “people who are the job producers.”
He also spoke about his pledge to lower utility costs by 50%. That would be done, he said, by “cutting out all the regulations,” opening up the natural gas reserves in upstate New York and getting rid of “Hochul’s green energy scam.”
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), New Yorkers pay an average of $139.53 a month in utility bills. If Blakeman gets elected and makes good on his promise, New York would have the lowest electricity rates in the U.S.
Kestenbaum also invited Hochul to appear on his show. Rather than make an appearance, she sent Kestenbaum the following statement: “Thank you very much for your email [invitation], As New York’s 57th governor, I look forward to working together to rebuild our communities and continue to move our great state forward.”
As part of his tax policy, Blakeman said he would eliminate taxes on the first $50,000 of an individual’s salary. For married couples, it would be the first $100,000. On top of that, he would add another 10% tax cut. The county executive told The New York Post that the tax cuts would cost $35 billion, but did not give details as to how they would be paid for.
New York State Senator Liz Krueger (D, WF-Manhattan), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said the price tag would be more like $60 billion. “
“I have no idea how the hell any executive would walk in and say ‘because I made this ridiculous promise to you I can’t deliver on, let me show you what $60 billion I will cut out of the state budget, but it won’t hurt any of you and nobody will notice,’” Krueger told Politico. “Give me a break.”
“He’s got no plan,” Matthew Aracich, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, told the outlet. “They’re just sound bites. He hasn’t said how he’s going to do it. He hasn’t explained one thing. Hasn’t debated anybody about how he’s going to do it, and he’s only taken negative approaches towards everything. Everything that Kathy does, I do the opposite. That’s not a campaign.”
Even E.J. McMahon, who worked for former GOP governor George Pataki and is now founding senior fellow of the Empire Center for Public Policy, called Blakeman’s tax policy “very back-of-the-envelope. A damp, coffee-stained envelope,” according to Politico.
Long Island Life & Politics reached out to the Blakeman campaign for comment. In response, Blakeman said he would pay for the tax cuts by “stop[ping] spending billions of taxpayer dollars on illegal migrants, we root out the waste and fraud Hochul created, and we stop driving our families and employers out of New York so our tax base stays right here at home.”
Blakeman said the utility rate cuts will be paid for through “slash[ing] utility bills in half by taking the $2.4 billion sitting idle in Hochul’s unspent Energy Tax slush fund and returning it straight to ratepayers as an immediate credit, permanently eliminating the System Benefit Charge from your monthly bill, and scrapping the radical carbon mandates driving up delivery rates. Finally, instead of buying expensive imported electricity, we tap into our own local natural gas and expand nuclear energy to generate cheap, reliable, New York–made power.”