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

New York’s Budget Targets the Golden Eggs

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • Wall Street Journal
  • April 3, 2009
  • Commentary

Gov. Paterson came into office with a different attitude. David Paterson took office as governor of New York on March 17, 2008 -- the day Bear Stearns collapsed. He spent the following nine months warning of worse things to come. Read More

How New York Stokes Dependency

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • April 30, 2010
  • Commentary

President Obama is expected to unveil his national health-insurance plan in just a couple of months. But when it comes to expanding government-subsidized coverage, broke and recession-battered New York state has already gotten a jump on him. Read More

Leaving Homeowners In The Lurch

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • May 15, 2009
  • Commentary

Gov. Paterson seems to have a bad case of amnesia on the issue that once identified him most strongly with New York taxpayers’ interests. Just less than a year ago, Paterson endorsed a blue-ribbon commission’s recommendation for a broad and comprehensive cap on the growth of local school-tax levies -- the single largest factor in sky-high property taxes outside New York City. Read More

NY’s Pension Peril

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • June 1, 2009
  • Commentary

New York state’s pension system lost 26 percent on its investments and shrunk by a net $45 billion in fiscal 2008-09, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli disclosed last week. Read More

The Budget New York Needs

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • City Journal
  • July 1, 2009
  • Commentary

Wall Street’s woes leave the state no choice but to slash spending. David Paterson took the oath as governor of New York on March 17, 2008, succeeding the disgraced Eliot Spitzer on the same day that Bear Stearns collapsed. Read More

Defuse the Pension Bomb

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • July 9, 2009
  • Commentary

New York’s public-pension system has become the epicenter of an in fluence-peddling scandal that has at tracted the attention of the SEC as well as state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. But the millions in shady “placement fees” pocketed by a few politically connected middlemen are small change compared with the mushrooming cost of lavish pension benefits for state and local government retirees. Read More

To Fix Pension Peril

  • by E.J. McMahon
  • New York Post
  • July 13, 2009
  • Commentary

Before staggering away from Albany last week, the state Senate delivered a pleasant surprise for taxpayers -- rejecting a well-intentioned but badly designed bill that would have allowed the state and local governments to borrow billions from the state pension system while potentially compounding financial risks for generations to come. Read More