Articles

Progressive Tax Reforms

Just about every progressive reform we want presupposes sound, progressive public finance. Progressive taxes and revenue-sharing have to be a top priority for us.

The state income tax reform suddenly rubber-stamped by the state legislature in December in a two-day special session at the behest of “the three men in a room” – the Governor, Assembly Speaker, and Senate Leader – was sold as “progressive” and titled a “Middle Income Tax Cut.” But the fact is that the real tax cuts only come in at incomes over $250,000, which makes their “middle class” the top 2% of income earners. The bottom 40% get no tax cut at all. A $1 million income family gets a $20,000 tax cut ($408 a week), while a median $54,554 income family gets a $218 tax cut ($4.19 a week). The tax rate for the lowest income bracket remains 4%, double the 2% it was in 1972 when New York's income tax was its most progressive. Meanwhile, the top bracket rate for multi-millionaires is capped at 8.82%, approaching half of the top rate of 15% in 1972.

The “progressive” part is that the tax on millionaires does not retreat until 2014 to the pre-2009 level of 6.85%, which was less than half of the 1972 top tax rate. The temporary millionaires tax raises an additional $1.5 billion for next year. But with a projected $3.5 billion budget deficit next year, it left $2 billion in cuts to be made. As the governor's 2012-13 budget proposal made clear in January, public services will take more big hits. Syracuse city schools still face $25-30 million more in spending cuts in the coming budget. Aid and Incentives to Municipalities was not increased even though Syracuse and many other municipalities face bankruptcy. The aid remains the same as it was 1989-90 even though the total state budget is now three times larger. Cuomo's budget message also scapegoated public employee pensions for fiscal problems, even though the state's pensions are fully funded and rely 85% on investment income for pension payments, according to the state Comptroller.

In short, the state tax and budget policies in place fall far short of what is needed to fund our schools, public services, and a Green New Deal to create full employment building the clean energy, transportation, and production systems we need for a sustainable and shared prosperity.

Meanwhile, no local progressive tax reforms are proposed by any city elected officials to avert the real possibility of municipal default and a state-imposed Financial Control Board of bankers appointed by the governor with the power to tear up labor contracts with municipal employees and impose even more draconian cuts to our schools and services. In Mayor Miner's State of the City address in late January, she projected taking $16 million of the $20 million from the city's reserve fund to balance the city budget next year, leaving only $4 million. The state Comptroller can authorize a Financial Control Board if the city's reserves fall below $10 million and put it in danger of defaulting on obligations.

In her address, perhaps anticipating the state's imposition of a Financial Control Board and hoping to get her appointees on it, Miner announced the formation of a Syracuse Municipal Financial Advisory Board, to be chaired by Richard Ravitch. Ravitch has been a longstanding fixture in New York's financial and political elite and a central player in using appointed financial control boards to resolve fiscal crises at a severe cost to services, schools, public workers, and working and middle class taxpayers, from New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975 to the Great Recession's state fiscal crisis of 2009-10 as Governor Paterson's appointed Lt. Governor, where Ravitch proposed a state financial control board that could override the budgets made by elected officials.

We will be pushing for progressive tax reforms at the state and local levels. In particular, we will be advocating a local income tax, which would include the incomes of the 62,000 commuters to the city who use city services but contribute nothing toward their costs. These commuters tend earn the middle and upper income salaries at nonprofit institutions that don't pay property taxes (city, county, state, and federal government offices, four hospitals, Syracuse University, SUNY-ESF). Assuming the median county income of $50,000 and a local income tax rate of 0.5%, a local income tax would raise $15.5 million from the commuters alone, which would nearly cover the projected draw down of the city's reserves next year. A progressive local income tax would be far more progressive than raising property taxes to balance the city budget.

Single-Payer Medicare for All

Health care costs and insurance premiums continue to rise at more than double the rate of inflation and real wage increases despite passage of the federal Affordable Care Act in 2009 and the state Prior Approval Law (of health insurance rates) in 2010. The rising cost of health care is wreaking havoc with household, business, and government budgets.

A state-sponsored study in 2009 found that a state single-payer Medicare-for-All system would control costs, cover every New Yorker with comprehensive benefits, and still save New Yorkers $28 billion in health care costs by 2018 compared to the individual mandate system adopted in the Affordable Care Act, which requires every individual or family to have health insurance or face a fine. But state officials just filed that study away.

We are organizing to build support for single-payer Medicare-for-All legislation that has been introduced at the state and federal levels. We support an improved Medicare-for-All program to provide comprehensive medical and dental care for all, free to consumers at the point of delivery, with freedom of choice for consumers among health care providers, publicly-financed and controlled by democratically elected boards.

Community Hiring Hall

The quickest way to get jobs into our high unemployment neighborhoods is to ensure a fair share city-funded jobs for city residents with city departments and city contractors.

We want to add a Community Hiring Hall to the Living Wage Ordinance in order to enforce equal employment opportunity for city residents in city-funded jobs, particularly minorities who are grossly under-represented in thousands of jobs with city contractors, according data in the annual reports of the Human Rights Commission through 2008. For example, blacks received only about one-third of their proportionate share of jobs with city contractors between 2004 and 2008. With the demise of the Human Rights Commission and its annual reports, we have no data reported for the last three years, but there is no reason to think the problem does not remain.

The Community Hiring Hall provisions of a strengthened Living Wage Law would require city departments and contractors to hire qualified workers from a Community Hiring Hall if they cannot meet minority and city resident employment goals from their usual labor sources. The Community Hiring Hall would help workers who sign up with it with job counseling, placement, training, and support services to help people qualify, get into, and stay in training programs and jobs.

Co-ops and a Municipal Development Bank

The longer term creation of permanent living wage jobs requires a strategy of developing worker- and community-owned cooperative and municipal enterprises. The decades old “corporate welfare” strategy of tax breaks to attract absentee-owned businesses to the city has obviously failed. We need a pro-active policy that builds our own community businesses where we own our own jobs in cooperatives and municipals. We will continue to advocate for Municipal Development Bank with an aggressive co-op business development arm to plan, finance, and advise new co-ops in the city. But we also support the development of a co-op of co-ops whose purpose would be the same as Municipal Development Bank – to develop co-ops, with or without city government support.

Public Power for Clean Affordable Energy

One municipal enterprise proposal that has widespread community support is a city-owned Public Power utility. We were able to push through funding for a $150,000 public power feasibility study through Common Council in 2008, but the Driscoll administration tried to steer the study away from public power and the funding was cut off. Our high National Grid bills continue to kill household budgets and business development.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis deepens and time is running out. The US government policy goal of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is far too little and too late. The Obama administration's actions at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa in December that succeeded in postponing a treaty for binding limits on carbon emissions until 2020 were crimes against humanity and the biosphere.

The international scientific consensus goal of preventing a global rise in temperatures past 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farhenheit) above pre-industrial levels is about the best that can be achieved given the greenhouse gases already released and the time required to convert to carbon-free energy sources. Beyond 2 degrees, global warming clearly threatens our civilization with land and ocean ecosystem collapses, droughts, fires, floods, and other extreme weather, food shortages and famines, coastal flooding, mass migrations of environmental refugees, and the spread and increase of insect-borne diseases like Lyme disease, West Nile virus, malaria, and dengue fever to formerly temperate regions like New York.

Even if the 2 degrees goal is met, the challenges of adjusting to climate change will be formidable. Climate science is clear that to limit planetary heating to 2 degrees Celsius, the industrialized countries like the US must peak emissions by 2015 and reduce them 10 percent year-on-year over the next decade. We have the technology to do this. It's the political will that is missing. There is no time to waste.

While it gives verbal praises and token funding to green energy, the Obama administration's energy policy priorities and big funding have been for hydrofracking for natural gas, mountaintop removal for coal, strip-mining tar sands for oil, drilling offshore, deep water, and Arctic fields for oil, and subsidies for nuclear power.

With public power, which would give us the power to choose to build an affordable, renewable, and clean energy and transportation system for our city, Syracuse could set a powerful example for the nation about what is possible and necessary to deal with global warming and economic revitalization.

We continue to work with the Public Power Coalition of Central New York to bring affordable, clean energy through a municipal power utility.

Transportation Justice</p>

While the city, county, state, and federal government have laudable initiatives for “complete streets” that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists, these efforts will come to little if proposed deep cuts of 35% in a pending six-year federal transportation spending bill passes. That would devastate our already inadequate public transit system, which has suffered recent fare hikes and route cuts. So we have to fight for a good federal transportation bill as well as expanding complete streets, which mass transit supports by reducing auto traffic.

The current poor state of mass transit is inexcusable considering that just about every neighborhood in every city and town in the US was served by clean electric trolleys between the 1890s and 1940s, many of them owned by power utilities. In one of the greatest corporate monopolization conspiracy crimes of all time, for which they were convicted in 1947, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil of California, and other oil, auto, and rubber manufacturers bought up municipal trolley systems, converted them to buses, and reduced service to make people dependent on the cars they sold and serviced. It is time to rebuild electrified mass transit that is convenient, affordable, and powered by clean renewable sources.

We are also engaged in the question of what happens to the elevated section of Interstate 81 through the city. Do we to leave unchanged planning that prioritizes car traffic by simply replacing the overhead interstate with a ground-level boulevard that still gives us asthma-inducing air pollution, parking garages, and traffic-filled streets? Or do we want to push for a car-free zone in the old 15th Ward, redeveloped as mixed-income and mixed-use neighborhood, a place where people – not cars and trucks – congregate, supported by convenient and affordable mass transit?

Ida Benderson Senior Center

Many of the seniors from the Ida Benderson Senior Center, which was closed by the city in October, continue to meet as the Ida Benderson Action Group. They plan to re-open at a new space with private funds that they have raised. We called for reinstating the Ida Benderson Senior Center in next year's city budget. With a growing population of seniors in the city, this center is needed.

Fair Elections

The demand for Public Campaign Financing is in the air. New York politicians from Cuomo on down have given it lip service for years, but nothing has happened. This year may be different. The Occupy Movement around the country is pushing it. Occupy Syracuse is raising it for the city of Syracuse. This is a longstanding Green platform plank. It is under discussion in Albany and Occupy Syracuse is trying to get it on the city agenda.

The other, perhaps even more important, fair elections plank in the Green platform is Proportional Representation. Proportional representation means that each party gets representation in proportion to the votes it receives. Our current winner-take-all system magnifies majorities and excludes minorities. That's how I can get 48% in an election and the Green Party gets no representation. That's how the Democrats get 100% of the offices in the city with a far short of 100% support.

The Greens will continue to push these reforms in coalition with anyone willing to join the effort.

Labor Committee

One of the most positive developments of the last year has been the revival of workers movements led by rank and file workers who have spearheaded the fight backs against austerity budgets and the assault on collective bargaining and led the proliferation of Occupy across the country. The professional staffs of the unions have been running to catch up and, unfortunately in most cases, trying to co-opt and contain these movements behind Democratic candidates who are only less extreme that the Republicans in promoting austerity and restrictions on workers' rights. The Solidarity Committee of Central New York has become a rallying place for rank and file workers locally. Workers in the Green Party are also forming a Labor Committee to address these issues in Green Party organizing and campaigns.

Green Party of Onondaga County
P.O. Box 562
Syracuse NY 13205
315-425-1019 www.syracusegreens.org