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

The Downturn & N.Y.

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • August 17, 2007
  • Commentary

Eliot Spitzer was swept into office by a record plurality, surrounded by impossibly high expectations that have already begun to deflate. As if that weren't enough, he was also the first New York governor since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1929 to take office at the peak of an economic expansion - which creates some heightened expectations of its own. Read More

Spitzer’s Intriguing Tax Cap Hint

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • August 29, 2007

In a Long Island speech yesterday, Governor Eliot Spitzer suggested for the first time that he might be willing to consider a state-imposed cap on property taxes. If the governor is serious, it could be a turning point for heavily burdened New York property owners. Read More

Bush Right to Curb Insurance ‘Crowd Out’

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • Times Union
  • September 4, 2007
  • Commentary

A Spitzer administration plan to add at least 60,000 kids to the state's government-subsidized Children's Health Insurance Program now hangs in limbo in the wake of new regulations issued recently by the Bush administration. Read More

N.Y.’s Falling Incomes

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • September 21, 2007
  • Commentary

After the record jump in Wall Street bonuses early this year, a slowdown in personal-income growth in New York and other finance-intensive states was inevitable in the second quarter. Read More

Rangel’s Knifing of New York

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • October 29, 2007
  • Commentary

What does Rep. Charlie Rangel have against his hometown, anyway? Anyone who didn't know better would think the "mother of all tax reforms" unveiled last week by the House Ways & Means chairman from Harlem was designed by rural populists to suck more juice out of the Big Apple. Read More

Crunch Time for the TWU

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • November 8, 2007
  • Commentary

Soon after the end of the Transit Workers Union's illegal 60-hour walkout in December 2005, Local 100 President Roger Toussaint boasted that his members had made good on a "credible threat" to strike. Later today, a state judge in Brooklyn will decide if they can get away with it. Read More

Spitzer Catches a Break on Medicaid

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Sun
  • November 16, 2006
  • Commentary

In a trend that has gained little notice outside state and federal budget offices, the growth rate in Medicaid expenditures across the country has slowed to subinflation levels that were last seen in the 1990s. It's even happening in New York — home to what is by far the nation's most costly Medicaid program. Read More