Samuelsen, Others Tell Cuomo: Keep the Millionaire's Tax!

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Working People Can't Move Out of State -- and Millionaires Won't
Working People Can't Move Out of State -- and Millionaires Won't

OCTOBER 17 -- Labor Leaders met community activists at City Hall today with a stop payment plan aimed Governor Cuomo and the State legislature. Top of the agenda: to keep the $5 billion generated annually by the State’s “millionaire’s tax” so that more money can flow to social services, education, and transit.

Using a large check with a $5 billion payment drawn from the 99 percent and payable to the 1 percent, leaders including TWU Local 100’s John Samuelsen demanded that the State keep progressive taxation alive.

“If you don’t tax those who have the ability to pay, you are forced to tax those who don’t have the ability to pay through sales taxes and other regressive taxes,” said NY State AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes.

Sunshine Ludder of the Center for Working Families cited their research debunking Gov. Cuomo’s oft-stated claim that if millionaires are forced to pay more, they will leave New  York, and take their hefty incomes with them. “There is no evidence linking peoples’ movement to their tax rates, but plenty of evidence that a millionaire’s tax does help state budgets,” she said. “From the period from 2008 through 2010, where a millionaire’s tax was in place, the number of high net worth households grew by ten percent. From 2003 to 2005, where a tax was in place, the number of those households grew by 30%,” she said.

One upstate millionaire, Bill Samuels, who made his fortune in plastics near Rochester, was on hand to urge Gov. Cuomo to get behind the higher tax rates. “The legislature and the Governor have made a terrible mistake by ending the tax,” he said. “Capitalism is only as good as the respect the citizens have for it.”