New York City’s 1 percent are paying a much larger share of the city’s income tax than the wealthiest 1 percent nationally are coughing up to Washington, data released Monday reveal.
The Big Apple’s top 35,400 filers — those with incomes of $598,000 or more — accounted for 45.7 percent of the $7.2 billion in income taxes that NYC collected in 2011, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.
In comparison, their counterparts around the country chipped in just 35.1 percent of the federal government’s income tax revenue that year.
Experts attributed the difference to the concentration of wealth and poverty here.
“The city has a large number of very wealthy people and a very large number of low-income residents. So the different spread of rich and poor in New York City compared with the country as a whole translates into the city’s richest paying a larger share of income taxes here than the wealthy pay on a national basis,” said Independent Budget Office spokesman Doug Turetsky.
The nonpartisan office said about 1.4 million people — 40 percent of all filers — who made less than $20,000 on average paid no income taxes at all in 2011.
The New York tristate area accounts for 11 percent of the nation’s tax filers, but 20 percent of those with annual incomes of $1 million or more, said E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy.
A very small number, 1,160, are categorized as super-wealthy, with incomes of $10 million or more in 2011. The majority lives in Manhattan. That select group accounted for 17.8 percent of the city’s income-tax revenue three years ago.
One key reason, the experts said, is that the super-rich hauled in $15 billion in capital gains in 2011, compared with $7 billion in wages, and the city taxes capital gains much more aggressively than the feds do.
“We tax capital gains, dividends, interest at the same rate as regular income. The feds treat capital gains especially favorably — and that’s a big portion of income on the high end — so nationally, [these filers] get a break, but not locally,” Turetsky explained.
© 2014 New York Post
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