Taxes of the Times

The New York Times yesterday came out for "a new 4 percent tax on income above $200,000 a year for married couples and above $100,000 for single taxpayers." The Web site of the Tax Policy Center, whose proposal it is that the Times is endorsing, acknowledges that under the proposal, "After 2010, the sum of the top statutory rates in the regular income tax and the add-on tax rate would be higher than the top statutory rates under pre-2001 law — 43.6 percent on ordinary income and 24 percent on capital gains."

In other words, the Times doesn't simply want to undo the Bush tax cuts — it wants to ratchet up taxes on higher-income Americans even higher than they were during the Clinton administration. And since the Clinton rates were themselves an increase over the Reagan and George H.W. Bush rates, what the Times plan really would do is return to tax levels not seen since the misery index and stagflation era of President Carter. It may yet change its slogan from "All the News That's Fit To Print" to "The Newspaper That Wants To Raise Your Taxes."

The excuse the Times offered yesterday for its proposed tax increase was that it would be a "fix" of the Alternative Minimum Tax. But the newspaper's support for tax increases is so reflexive that it is starting to seem like the Times supports a four-percent tax increase on those earning more than $100,000 as a kind of all-purpose remedy to whatever is the latest problem to come along. Back on October 2, 2004, the paper suggested it as a way to make Social Security more solvent.

Back then, the Times backed increasing the payroll tax on wages above the level — $97,500 this year — that are subject to Social Security taxes. "An additional tax of 3 to 4 percent on wages above the base (split between employees and employers), imposed over 75 years, would make the system fairer and correct about one-third of Social Security's imbalance," the Times wrote in that October 2, 2004, editorial suggesting further that taxes also be increased 0.2 percentage points on wages below the cutoff.

If an individual earns less than $100,000 a year, the Times wants to tax him or her more, too. Just last month, The Times had an editorial backing a new $2 a pack tax on cigarettes in Nassau County, which it said would amount to a tax increase of between $26 million and $31 million a year. Also last month, the Times had an editorial plumping for a new five-cent a bottle tax on "water, iced tea, sports drinks and juice" sold in New York State.

The New York Sun, for our part, is proud to support lower taxes in New York City and New York State and at the federal level. What puzzles us, though, is that if the Times is so all-fired in favor of taxes, what is holding the paper's owners back from returning the tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks they sought and received from the city and the state to build a new headquarters building in which to house the editorialists they employ to beat the drums for higher taxes?