By: Dan Cummings | WSYR-TV Newsmakers

Dan’s guest is Martin Babinec, candidate of the Reform Party, who is running for Congress in Central New York’s 22nd District.

If Babinec’s apparent write-in victory on primary night holds up, he will be in a three-way race against Republican-Conservative Claudia Tenney and Democrat Kim Myers in November.

Babinec, an entrepreneur from Little Falls, discusses his platform for job creation and why he chose to seek the Congressional seat this year.

Question: What makes your job creation model different than the Governor Cuomo’s economic development model? 

There is an important distinction. I’m not a believer in using government money to be directly invested in private companies. The federal government put an awful lot of money into cleantech companies most recently that proved not to be good investments. Government doesn’t do a good job at picking winners. I’m a believer that the private markets are better equipped to take that risk instead of taxpayers. So that’s one fundamental difference. Secondly, our state efforts, and even our local efforts, are often times pointed at business attraction, saying if we offer some kind of tax break or if we do something that gives them a financial incentive, we’ll have a company relocate from another area to move to the area where we’re trying to create more businesses. And fundamentally I believe we have the assets in Upstate New York to grow companies and grow jobs from the ground up, but that means creating the environment that is specifically conducive to supporting entrepreneurs in these innovation industries. And I’d like to point out that my Jobs Plan, even if it does speak to emphasizing these new industries, the economic statistics would show that these newer industries, what the economist would call the tradable sector – creating products or services being sold to nonlocal customers create more jobs for the community. Manufacturing politicians will tell you that every one job in manufacturing creates 1.4 jobs in the local community. In the innovation sector, which is the tradable part of the innovation, actually create five jobs in the local community for every one job. So you can have a startup of 10 employees, which then creates 50 employees out in the community as a result of the model of these innovation companies.

Watch Martin Babinec’s full interview on WSYR-TV’s Newsmakers with Dan Cummings

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