This is the best idea I’ve heard in a long time. Brad Lander from District 39 on the New York City Council:
Here in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed laying off over 4,000 public school teachers, closing 20 fire companies at night, closing dozens of child care centers, eliminating over 2,000 summer youth jobs and leaving more runaway homeless youth to sleep on the streets.
So it is time for cities and states to step up. That’s why the New York City Council’s Progressive Caucus, which I co-chair, has introduced a plan to place a temporary city/state income tax surcharge on the wealthiest New Yorkers—precisely the amount of the tax windfall they are getting from incoming Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
We are encouraging other legislators around the U.S. to do the same. We will repeal the surcharge the minute that Congress and the President end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest and restore some tax fairness to the federal tax system.
Our proposal would raise over $8 billion annually. For that amount, we can keep the child care center open. We can avoid laying off thousands of school teachers. We can keep the fire companies open at night. We can keep shelter beds in place for homeless teens who are sleeping on the street. We can keep our libraries open 6 days a week (the Mayor’s proposal would likely reduce some branches to just 2 or 3 days next year). And we could still reduce the City’s budget deficit.
Every state should do this. Of course, any state, any part of which is controlled by Republicans, will not do it, meaning that those states like Connecticut, which will be Republican free in a couple of weeks, have a golden opportunity to improve their economies relative to their afflicted-with-Republicans neighbors. From an economic point of view this is a no-brainer. Circulating this money, which would be stashed away rather than spent, back into the economies of the taxpayer’s home state could do nothing but good. In addition, for states like Connecticut, this would be a double bonus, since we are normally net exporters of federal tax dollars. If the federal government doesn’t want to send our money down South to the Yahoos, we can use it here, to help solve our budget problems without putting people out of work.
We could also, particularly if several states adopted similar laws, demonstrate that Obama’s original plan made more sense than the compromise.
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