There will be no New Yorkers left to tax

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Will the last wealthy person leaving New York State please turn off the lights? While leftists across the country are tied up in their underwear trying to find ways to punish success with over-taxation, New York has lost taxpayers at an alarming rate. Not all taxpayers actually, just the ones who pay the highest taxes.

Most of the state coffers in this country are close to insolvency; New York is closer to the edge than most. Being one of the “bluest” of states in 2009, New York’s lawmakers adopted a surcharge on personal income taxes for those making more than $200,000. The Partnership for New York City, an organization dedicated to maintaining NYC as the world’s business center, explains: “The surcharge was structured to sunset after three years, at the end of 2011, to mitigate the impact of this significant tax increase on affected taxpayers, who tend to be major contributors to job creation and employment in the state”

Many progressives are now calling for that “millionaire’s tax” to be extended, or even permanently added to the New York state tax law (it’s called the millionaires tax even though 76% of the people who pay it are not millionaires.)

The “progressive bible,” the New York Times recently editorialized: “Wealthy families got a generous break from Washington with the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. Mr. Cuomo should extend New York’s surcharge for two more years.”

I always wonder why progressives always call it a “break” when people are allowed to keep their own money.  New York already has the second-heaviest state tax burden in the country; the Tax Foundation reported that “in 2009, the residents of three states stand above the rest, paying the highest state-local tax burdens in the nation: New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. They’re the only three states where taxpayers give up 12+ percent of their income in state-local taxes, a full percentage point above the next highest state, Wisconsin.” It is that heavy Wisconsin tax burden along with an increasing deficit that led the state to enact the policies that caused the national labor movement (with a little help from the President Obama’s Organizing for America PAC) to show up and protest at the state capitol.

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