New York State Hands Billions Back to Wealthy Investors--and NYT Doesn't See a Story
APRIL 15, 2021
ARI PAUL
New York State Assemb. Phil Steck had an idea. A great many Democrats have agreed that the state needs more revenue, not just to avoid budget cuts but to augment services and fund education. New Yorkers already fund the state through income taxes and sales taxes; the legalization of marijuana adds another “sin tax.” Shouldn’t the state, he said, also take a tiny slice out of stock trades?
Funny story: The state does have a stock transfer tax, it’s just that since 1982, all of the revenue from those taxes is rebated back to investors. So 100% of an on-the-books tax goes to subsidizing the wealthy people who pay it, and the public receives nothing. Steck proposed repealing the rebate, a move that some lawmakers said would “raise an estimated $13–16 billion in annual revenue” for the state. The pro-business Citizens Budget Commission (11/9/20) came out against removing the rebate, although generally transaction taxes are popular among a wide range of economists and policy experts.
Steck’s bill got some discussion in the press (Albany Times-Union, 5/20/19; Spectrum News, 9/21/20; City and State, 12/21/20), but not enough to make a splash, even though it was a seemingly pragmatic policy response to the outcry against inequality raised by Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and economists like Thomas Piketty. The editors of the New York Times clearly know about the public outrage about inequality—and affect concern about it.
The New York Times could have written about this fundamental outrage, that the state has billions of dollars that could pay for roads, schools and services from Troy to Buffalo but instead is handed back to wealthy financiers. Why not highlight such a crude imbalance by featuring a bill that’s trying to fix it?
More:
https://fair.org/home/new-york-state-hands-billions-back-to-wealthy-investors-and-nyt-doesnt-see-a-story/
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