Just Another Politician

10. December 2011 by admin.

In 2010, I voted for Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate, in the New York gubernatorial election.  He was the Tea Party candidate, and a bit of a nut, but I couldn’t to bring myself to vote for Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic candidate, because he was just another politician.  (That, and his father had been governor before him.)

I doubted that Paladino would actually win, and I was right.

But I was pleasantly surprised with the first few months of Governor Cuomo.  He stood up to the rest of the government and was able to balance the budget with no new taxes.  Even though I didn’t vote for him, I was pleased to see him succeed.

Until this week.

In 2009, New York passed a temporary income tax surcharge on those earning over about $200k/year.  The surcharge is set to expire at the end of this year.  It’s the mirror image of the Federal ‘Bush tax cuts’ in that it’s a temporary increase in tax rates.

For the last few months, Governor Cuomo was insisting that he would not renew the surcharge.  But he’s apparently been worn down.  In the last two weeks, he has been talking about ‘using the tax code to create new jobs.’  I have no idea what that means.

And now this week, we have new income tax rates.  The highest rate is now 8.82%, well above the pre-surcharge rate of 6.85%, but below the surcharged rate of 8.97%.  For the rest of us, we get a 0.2% rate cut, or about 3-4% of the average New Yorker’s state income taxes.

Oh, goody: I got a tax cut.  It’s not enough to even pay for my daily newspaper, but I’m supposed to be all happy about it.

And if I earned millions, I could still say I got a tax cut, at least with respect to last year’s tax rates.

I still can’t see for the life of me how such tweakage will create one single job.

Posted in New York State, Dysfunctional Government | 1 Comment »