Monday, January 26, 2015

NYU Tax Policy Colloquium - another cancellation due to winter weather!

Tomorrow's Tax Policy Colloquium sessions, featuring my colleague David Kamin's paper "In Good Times and Bad: Designing Legislation That Responds to Fiscal Uncertainty," has been cancelled due to the blizzard that is already hitting NYC and thereabouts.

We also had a session cancelled last year due to a winter storm, and a second session was hampered because the author understandably wanted to head back to the airport early - in the middle of the 4 pm session - before yet another another storm might have trapped her in NYC for up to 48 hours.  And we also had a cancellation due to the weather a couple of years before that.

In the first 15-plus years of the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, we not only never had a weather-based cancellation, but it was never even close.  There may have been about two storms during that whole period that would have been a problem had they hit on the wrong day of the week.

Then there are the two hurricanes we had in NYC in recent years, one of which knocked out electrical power in downtown Manhattan for 6 whole days.  The other one might have done similar damage, except that luckily it peaked at low tide, rather than high tide.

Anecdotal though this may be, I certainly get the impression that climate change is starting to have a personal impact here.

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