The radical leftist Working Families Party is pushing the old hippies and young narcissists of Occupy Wall Street to champion one of its pet issues — extension of New York’s so-called Millionaires Surcharge Tax.
By calling for renewal of the tax, now set to expire Dec. 31, the WFP has broken its solemn 2010 pledge to then-candidate Andrew Cuomo to support his New NY Agenda — which stated that, as governor, Cuomo would “veto any increase in personal or corporate income taxes or sales tax.”
Cuomo made it clear, in the 2010 campaign, that he was opposed to extending the milliona🐟ire’s tax beyond 2011. “I was against iꦐt at the time, and I still am. It’s a new tax. It was supposed to sunset. If it doesn’t sunset, it’s a tax,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
Yet many are hoping C🗹uomo will change his tune. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver this week sounded very confident that the tax would be renewed in some form, saying at a press conference: “The public has weighed in, overwhelmingly, that they don’t want millionaires to get a tax reduction at this time when the state’s economy is so poor. After several months of debate, I think we, the public, can win that discussion.”
In fact, the “Millionaires Tax” — which actually kicks in at $200,000 for singles and $300,000 for married couples — hurts the very middle class that Silver and the WFP claim to champion.
In Long Island, where I live, many families with two working members making 300 grand a year have trouble living on what’s left after paying feᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚderal and state taxes and a laundry list of local taxes and assessments. (I pay 18 different local taxes.)
New York’s high cost of living leaves these families just scraping by. A report last year made headlines with news that a Dallas household living on $125,000 must earn $250,000 to live the same lifestyle in New York. Even very liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer noted recently, “$250,000 makes♛ you very rich in Mississippi, but it doesn’t make you rich at all in New York.”
New York City residents are also hit hard by the Millionaires Tax. The combined state and city income tax is 12.62 percent, the highest burden in the nation — and the top 1 percent of the city pays 51 percent of total income tax. That is, just 40,000 households out of 4 million in the city are responsible for more than half the tax revenue. If only 5,000 of those families bolt to low-tax states, the city’s tax base would be wrecked.
Fortunately, Gov. Cuomo has stood up to the double-crossing WFP and its “soak the rich” ideology. Comparing his refusal to extend the surcharge to his father’s principled opposition to the death penalty in the 1980s, the governor said, “The fact that everybody wants it [the surcharge tax] doesn’t mean that much. I represent the people. Their opinion matters, but I’m not going to go back and forth with the political winds … You can’t just have as a governor a big poll-taking machine, right? And we take a poll and whatever the poll says, that’s what we do.”
Gov. Cuomo is right. Our state is structured as a representative democracy; it is not government by plebiscite. As the great 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke once reminded his constituents, “Your representative owes you, not his industꦇry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
The governor exhibited a sound understanding of New York’s situation when he said on Oct. 17, “You are kidding yourself if you think you can be one of the highest-taxed states in the nation, have a reputation for being anti-business — and have a rosy economic future.”
If Cuomo is to succeed in stemming New York’s economic hemorrh🌼aging and achieving his goal to make it the jobs capital of the country, he must answer John Kennedy’s “call to responsibility,” defined in “Profiles in Courage” as choosing the right side of an issue over the popular side. And being on the right side this time means scragging the surcharge tax.
George J. Marlin’s new book is “Narcissist Nation: Reflections of a Blue-State Conservative.”