Mayor Equivocates on Tax Sunsets
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.

Mayor Bloomberg, who told New Yorkers in his State of the City address in January that the temporary income tax and sales tax surcharges would sunset on time, was more equivocal yesterday, saying he would like to see both taxes sunset “if at all possible.”
“I think that we have too high taxes,” the mayor told reporters during a health-related event at Harlem Hospital. “The governor has been very vocal on trying to make sure the two taxes do sunset the way the schedule has called for. The state Legislature has some budgetary problems to address, and we’ll have to see how that all plays out.”
Those budgetary problems now include a court ruling that the state needs to beef up education spending in New York City by $5.6 billion. Albany has already said it is a burden it can ill afford. It seems unlikely that they will add to the city’s school budget and provide tax relief, too, given the current state of budgetary affairs.
“I don’t think they should be allowed to treat this as inevitable,” said a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute, E.J. McMahon. “That’s a very bad idea and harmful to the economy. It would represent a significant breach of faith with taxpayers.”
The mayor’s tax-cut waffling is a far cry from his January pronouncement that the “personal income tax is going to sunset on schedule.” He had also said the “emergency” sales tax on clothing purchases of less than $110 would sunset, but lawmakers in Albany extended it for another year, until May 2005.
Analysts said the problem is that once lawmakers have a tax in place, it is relatively easy not to rescind it. Having a tax not go away is psychologically very different from having one imposed.
While President Bush has suggested a simplification of the tax code, New York seems to be trending the other way.
The 2003 “emergency” tax increases made an already-complicated tax structure that much more intricate, adding two new brackets to the top of the city’s income-tax schedule. Annual income in excess of $500,000 is taxed at 4.45% while incomes in excess of $100,000 are taxed at 4.25%. The top rate used to be 3.65%.
Add the state income tax rate to the city’s new total and New Yorkers with taxable incomes of more than $500,000 have a combined state and city tax rate of 12.15%, according to the budget newsletter Fiscal-Watch. Single taxpayers making $100,000 and married couples making $150,000 have a top rate of 11.75%, it said.
And the sales tax is now 8.625%.
“I just don’t think we can continue to have high taxes and keep jobs in this city, and keep people who are trying to feed their families able to do so,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday. “I am certainly in favor of reducing taxes. In terms of talking about those specific things, I would like to see both those taxes sunset – if at all possible.”