Does World Anti-Corruption Fight Have Lessons for NY?

A whopping 83% of New York State voters say “government corruption is a very or somewhat serious problem.” The Governor’s Moreland Commission wrote in its December 2013 preliminary report that New York is suffering from an “epidemic of public corruption that has infected this State” and “it is clear already from the Commission’s ongoing investigations, the (political) system itself truly is “all about how much.”

Unfortunately, nothing seems to be changing. This is a state election year, but concerns about corruption do not seem to be influencing any major races. Maybe this is because the public doesn’t really feel the cost of corruption. Nobody has put a dollar figure on how much corruption costs New York tax-payers in higher taxes and bad public services. Maybe New York can learn from the anti-poverty group One.org’s new report “The One Trillion Dollar Scandal” which calculates the cost of corruption to the developing world at a trillion dollars a year, and 3.6 million deaths due to disease and poverty. What does corruption cost New Yorkers?