In its look-back today on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s second legislative session, The New York Times quotes the governor as saying he had “front-loaded” the legislative calendar... Read More
Tag: Taxes and Spending
“The first casualty of war is always the truth,” Winston Churchill observed. The same might be said of political battles. Around New York in this campaign season, incumbent state legislators in both parties have been bending facts into pretzels when they discuss their recent records on state taxes, in particular. Read More
The biggest of the almost-new taxes in Governor Cuomo’s “no new taxes” budget is being targeted for elimination by state Senate Republicans. They were joined today by business and industry representatives in calling on Cuomo to remove the extension of the Section 18-A “assessment” from his budget proposal. Read More
Senate Republicans today unveiled some new proposed personal income tax (PIT) adjustments that would generate savings for middle-class families.* For a couple with income of $70,000 and two children under 17, the potential annual tax cut from the proposed Family Tax Relief Act would appear to come to roughly $700... Read More
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has jumped on the bandwagon in favor of raising New York City’s top resident income tax rate — just a day after two undeclared 2013 mayoral candidates, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and then-City Comptroller William Thompson stepped (somewhat gingerly) off it. Read More
The just-enacted federal tax increase will fall heavily on high-income New Yorkers – but will take a much smaller bite out of the Empire State’s tax base than President Barack Obama had been seeking... Read More
“First get your facts,” Mark Twain once said, “and then you can distort them as much as you please.” Following Twain’s advice, State Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) have unleashed a fresh set of purported “facts” about New York taxes, in response to my criticism last week of their call for higher state income taxes on households earning more than $1 million a year. Read More
New York ranks number-one in the Tax Foundation’s latest annual ranking of combined state and local tax burdens, released this morning. As of 2011, the combined per-capita tax burden on New Yorkers came to 12.6 percent of per-capita state income, the report said. The national average was 9.8 percent. Read More