Contact: Dan Levitan
The Working Families Party released today the following statement on the Governor’s proposal to shrink the budget gap through severe spending cuts. It can be attributed to Dan Cantor, Working Families Party Executive Director:
With New York facing a $2 billion deficit this year and another $12 billion next year, everyone - including New York’s wealthiest - will have to do their part to get our state through this crisis.
The Governor’s plan asks school children, local property tax payers, students at SUNY and CUNY, the elderly and New Yorkers with disabilities to sacrifice. The only people exempt from the pain are wealthy New Yorkers and the Wall Street barons who got us into this in the first place. That’s wrong.
Following the economic downturn after September 11, the national recession, and the burst of the dot-com bubble, New York increased income tax rates in 2003. The State employed a temporary top rate of 7.25 percent for single filers with incomes over $100,000 and 7.7 percent on income over $500,000.
The Governor repeatedly says that raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers would have a negative impact on New York’s economy, but an examination of New York’s post 9/11 surcharge shows no negative economic impact. In fact, during this time, high-wage earners saw positive income growth, economic conditions improved overall, and the State saw thousands of new job created.
The Governor also suggests that an increase would put New York at a competitive disadvantage with neighboring states. How does he reconcile that with the fact that families in New Jersey earning more than $500,000 currently pay 8.97% in taxes - nearly a point and a half more than they would in New York under the Millionaire’s Tax proposal?
No less distinguished a voice than Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Governor Paterson and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos about the choices that await them as they confront New York’s gaping deficit.
Stiglitz wrote that ‘Increases on higher-income families are the least damaging mechanism for closing state fiscal deficits in the short run. Reductions in government spending on goods and services, or reductions in transfer payments to lower-income families, are likely to be more damaging to the economy in the short run than tax increases focused on higher-income families.’
He’s right. The Governor should be calling for real shared sacrifice, not just cuts that hurt working families.
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