E.J. McMahon

Founding Senior Fellow

Edmund J. McMahon was the Empire Center’s founding senior fellow.

McMahon’s writing and research has focused on improving New York’s economic competitiveness and promoting greater transparency, accountability and fiscal responsibility in state and local government. He has authored or co-authored major studies on public pension reform, collective bargaining, population migration, budget trends and tax policy in New York. His influential “Blueprint for a Better Budget,” published in January 2010, featured a number of recommendations subsequently implemented under Governors David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo. McMahon also was a leading advocate of an across-the-board cap on property taxes in New York before it was enacted at Governor Cuomo’s initiative in 2011.

McMahon has published numerous articles and essays in publications including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barron’s, the Public Interest, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday and the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. His frequent radio and TV interviews have included appearances on CNBC, Fox News Channel and Bloomberg News, as well as on regional cable and broadcast outlets throughout New York State.

McMahon’s professional background includes nearly 30 years as an Albany-based analyst and close observer of New York State government. As chief fiscal advisor to the Assembly Republican Conference in the early 1990s, he drafted a personal income tax reform plan that would become the basis for historic tax cuts enacted under Governor George E. Pataki. Previously, as research director of the Public Policy Institute, he worked on the Institute’s counter-budget proposals and developed the template for New York’s school report cards. He also served as a deputy commissioner in the state Department of Taxation and Finance and as a vice chancellor of the State University of New York.

McMahon is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which he joined in June 2000. In January 2005, he opened the Institute’s Albany-based Empire Center project, which became an independent nonprofit think tank in 2013. He was the Empire Center’s founding president and became research director in the fall of 2016.

Earlier in his career, he was a staff writer and columnist for the Albany Times Union and The Knickerbocker News.

McMahon is a graduate of Villanova University.

Latest Work

Botched Cleanup: New York City’s & State’s Post-9/11 Fiscal Failure

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • August 22, 2002
  • Commentary

Imagine if construction crews had just bulldozed most of the Ground Zero wreckage a few blocks further down West Street - and then took this summer off. In effect, that's how Albany and City Hall responded when, in the wake of 9/11, the state and city budgets plunged into the fiscal equivalent of a 10-story-deep, debris-filled hole in the ground. Read More

Pataki’s ‘Progress’

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • October 8, 2002
  • Commentary

You wouldn't know it from the gubernatorial campaign commercials, but New York state is facing an enormous budget gap next year. By far the toughest challenge facing the winner of the Nov. 5 election will be to close that gap without derailing a still-wobbly state economy. Read More

Now, The Hard Part

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • November 6, 2002
  • Commentary

Safely assured of a third term as governor of New York, George Pataki must tackle the state's worst fiscal mess in at least a dozen years. Effective today, Albany's official tune on budget matters changes from "Don't Worry, Be Happy" to "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Read More

Rotten ‘Reform’

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • November 14, 2002
  • Commentary

Facing an uphill battle in Albany to win renewal of New York City's former commuter tax, the Bloomberg administration is floating a new "tax reform" idea that can only be described as breathtakingly wrongheaded. Read More

A Win for N.Y.

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • Manhattan Institute
  • January 13, 2003
  • Commentary

Which key sector of New York's economy has experienced a deep slump that is largely to blame for recent state and city revenue shortfalls? And which sector of New York's economy will benefit the most from President Bush's new tax proposal? Read More

The Return of George I

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • National Review
  • January 28, 2003
  • Commentary

Given his Rockefeller Lite persona in recent years, no one would have been surprised if New York's Governor George E. Pataki had responded to a looming fiscal crisis with a round of tax increases, if not on the scale of Democrat Gray Davis's gargantuan $8 billion hike in California, then something like Republican John Rowland's soak-the-rich surcharge in Connecticut. Read More

Tale of Two Budgets

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • February 3, 2003
  • Commentary

With New York's future at risk, Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg are taking sharply contrasting approaches to closing huge budget gaps. Or are they? Read More