There He Goes Again
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
City Council speaker and mayoral candidate Gifford Miller seems to have an excessive fondness for other people’s money, and now he’s enlisting the city council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus in his efforts to grab more of it. Yesterday, members of the caucus stood on the steps of the Tweed Courthouse to endorse Mr. Miller’s proposed extension of a huge income-tax increase on the highest earning, in many cases hardest-working, New Yorkers.
The tax was initially imposed on 2003 income as a “temporary” money raiser that would sunset at the end of 2005. It increased the city income-tax rate for households with income over $500,000 a year to 4.45% from 3.648%, according to Michael Jacobs, a senior economist at the New York City Independent Budget Office.
But after all the talk of a temporary measure, Mr. Miller and company want to stop the sunset. That would cost the roughly 26,000 filers who pay the tax an average of $14,615 each a year. That’s enough for each of those families to hire a moving van and movers to take them to a city, state, or suburb with no income tax at all.
New Yorkers already pay some of the highest state and local taxes in the country. And Mr. Miller just keeps trying to take more. He has proposed increasing the commuter tax to raise another $500 million, forcibly taxing the people New Yorkers try to get to come work here. Now he seems bent on creating more suburbanites by increasing taxes on those earners domiciled here in the city. Mayor Bloomberg may have been weak when it came to this particular tax – he lobbied Albany to extend it – but Mr. Bloomberg at least proposed an off-setting reduction in the sales tax.
Mr. Miller and his allies say they want to spend these tax dollars on hiring 2,000 more public school teachers. But the speaker, who lately has been spending taxpayer money mailing out what look like campaign brochures to tout his seamy school plan, surely knows that money is fungible. Instead of taxing and spending, it would be nice if Mr. Miller would start thinking about letting New Yorkers make their own decisions about how to allocate their hard-earned income.
