I'm confused.
The City's Independent Budget Office has released a report stating that New York City residents pay much higher state and local taxes than residents of any other city in the US.
How can this be possible?
From 1994 until 2002, wasn't our Mayor a conservative and a tax cutter? Didn't he cut the welfare rolls and refuse to cave into unions. Isn't he the natural heir to Ronald Reagan. Doesn't his conservative fiscal policy mean that Republican primary voters should vote for him despite his views on social issues?
Can Fred Siegel, Steve Malanga, the other folk at the Manhattan Institute, the editorial writers at the NY Post and NY Sun explain how this could have happened?
Don't be so confused, Yoda. If you just bothered to go to the original sources before posting your comments, you wouldn't be so confused. In the original IBO study, which was done in 2000 based on fy 1997 tax data, the IBO noted that Giuliani was, indeed, substantially lowering the city's tax burden. It noted, for instance, that in just the two fiscal years following 1997 (which weren't included in the report's tables) tax cuts had lowered the city's tax burden by 63 cents on every $100 of productive income, from $7.99 to $7.36. As the report stated: "Availablel information indicates that other cities have not matched the tax cutting vigor of New York City, suggesting that the tax effort gap between New York and other cities has shrunk since 1997."
The new IBO report, which is a follow up to the previous report, is for fy 2004 and includes the effect of the Bloomberg property tax increase--the largest single tax increase in NYC history, as well as other tax increases, which have reversed the overall decline in tax effort of the Giuliani years. The report also includes state taxes, which the previous report did not measure.
Had Bloomberg not panicked and raised property taxes so precipitiously, and had he subsequently used the city's surpluses in recent years to cut taxes, in short, had he continued in the direction Giuliani was going, it is very likely that today the city's tax effort would be up to $1.50 lper $100 ower than it was in 1997.