ALG Editor’s Note: In these stressful economic times, now is not the time to raise taxes. Apparently, however, as the following featured editorial demonstrates, the New York State Assembly apparently didn’t get the memo:
SILVER’S OTHER SIN
Posted: 3:54 am
August 21, 2008
Not only did Speaker Sheldon Silver and his Assembly bandits seek to sock successful New Yorkers with steep tax hikes Tuesday, they also flipped the bird to hard-pressed homeowners sorely in need of property-tax relief.
Property taxes in New York have soared astronomically in recent years, jumping 60 percent from 1995 to 2005 – more than twice the rate of inflation.
Homeowners here consistently bear one of the heaviest tax burdens in the nation – about 49 percent above the load in other states, per capita.
That has devastated communities, which have seen residents (and businesses and jobs) flee. Those who remain are hurting, and a shaky economy threatens to make matters even worse.
Indeed, so crushing has New York’s tax load become – and so hot an issue – that this year a liberal governor from Harlem, David Paterson, and a state Senate usually beholden to labor’s pro-tax demands finally agreed to act.
Paterson proposed capping future hikes at either 4 percent or 120 percent of inflation, whichever is lower. The Senate’s already on board.
Silver, unfortunately, is on board with the teachers union, which calls the important shots in the Assembly – and which violently rejects the cap.
Instead, Silver & Co. tried to trick New Yorkers – passing a device they call a “circuit breaker” and pretending it was a cap. The device would use revenue from tax hikes on the “wealthy” (whose annual income-tax impost would rise as much as 26 percent!) to foot the bill for lowering property taxes exclusively for some lower-income homeowners.
But it would do nothing to restrain the unsustainable growth in overall school spending in New York – up 68 percent from ’95 to ’05, also twice the rate of inflation.
So taxpayers lose again.
And the teachers unions win.
Yes, there was some good news, as we noted yesterday: The Assembly tax hikes failed to get Senate backing. And lawmakers OK’d minor rollbacks in spending growth, shrinking next year’s $6.4 billion cash gap to “only” $5.3 billion.
Clearly, they could have done more damage; that they didn’t owes much to Gov. Paterson’s concerted push for fiscal responsibility and repeated warnings about inaction.
Paterson surely deserves a tip of the hat for his impressive achievement.
But homeowners are still bleeding.
The state remains on track to spend some $25 billion more than it’ll take in over the next three years.
And does anyone really think Albany won’t try to zap taxpayers with new levies right after the Nov. 4 election?
Paterson – the only man in Albany who seems to care about such things – sure has his work cut out for him.
