The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel offer’s her take on the Working Families Party’s Fair Share Tax Reform campaign in a new Editor’s Cut column:
What Will New York Do?
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 02/23/2009 @ 2:32pm
Now that thirty years of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy have failed so spectacularly, creating an economic catastrophe in its wake, the American people are beginning to recognize conservative economic policy for what it is: a disastrous recipe for privatizing profits and socializing costs, and shifting the economic burden to the poor and middle class.
But with 46 states facing budget shortfalls it is clear that conservative orthodoxy is still alive and holding sway in too many statehouses. Too often, the emphasis isn’t on change we can believe in — but on the same old cutting of services that people need rather than raising taxes on the rich who have disproportionately benefited from fiscal policy over these many decades.
We certainly see this short-sighted and proven wrong approach being pushed in New York. The state is confronting a budget deficit of $15 billion, and Governor Paterson has proposed $9 billion of harsh cuts in education, healthcare and social services, and $5 billion in new taxes that would hit the struggling poor and middle-class the hardest — making an already regressive tax system even more so.
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Fortunately there is a great alternative proposal gaining momentum in the New York legislature and with constituents. Democratic Senator and Nation contributor Eric Schneiderman has introduced the Fair Share Tax Reform Act of 2009 which would raise $6 billion in new annual revenues by slightly increasing the taxes on the wealthiest 5 percent of New Yorkers.
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That response includes a broad coalition led by the Working Families Party (WFP), joined by a network of human services groups, unions, and community action organizations. The coalition acknowledges that some cuts will need to be made. “But we should temper those cuts by asking the rich to pay their fair share of taxes,” WFP spokesman Dan Levitan said. “Governor Paterson has proposed devastating cuts to classrooms, hospitals, the elderly and disabled, and everything from mass transit to zoos. Fair Share Tax Reform would stop those cuts and make our tax system more progressive.”
