Contact: Dan Levitan
The Working Families Party today released the following statement on tomorrow’s special legislative session. It can be attributed to Bob Master, Working Families Party Co-Chair:
“Tomorrow, Governor Paterson is asking New York’s working families to swallow billions in budget cuts. The cuts will negatively impact millions of New Yorkers: SUNY and CUNY students, local property tax payers, the elderly, New Yorkers with disabilities, school children - the list goes on and on.
Everyone is being asked to sacrifice, everyone except the wealthiest New Yorkers who could most afford to do so.
We can get through the economic downturn and solve New York’s budget crisis, but only with true shared sacrifice. That means both making prudent spending cuts and asking the rich to contribute a little bit more to the cost of saving critical public investments.
It is not only fair, it is economically sound. The Governor’s own economic advisors, like Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, have cautioned that at a time of plummeting consumer spending, drastic cuts in state spending could sink New York even deeper into recession. Stiglitz recently wrote to Albany leaders that “increases on higher-income families are the least damaging mechanism for closing state fiscal deficits in the short run.”
The Governor and the legislature should remember that combining modest budget cuts and modest tax increases is a formula that has worked before. In 2003, during the post-9/11recession, New York raised taxes on the rich. The economy grew, the number of high-income New Yorkers actually increased, and critical revenue was raised to keep New York solvent.
New York’s working families are hoping the legislature and the Governor heed the lessons of recent history and remember that shared sacrifice must mean exactly that.”
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