| Last night the Legislature and the Governor, in classic three-men-in-a-room fashion, passed a new tax bill complete with a unanimous Senate vote while the pages were still warm and no one had time to read them. You can see the resulting tax brackets here.
It's not precisely the "millionaire's tax" but it's also very different from the pre-2009 rates. Whether taxes on the rich have gone up or down depends on where you start counting from, giving the Murdoch papers and their friends room to complain about tax hikes while everyone else considers it a tax cut.
What's interesting to me, beyond the rates, is the rhetoric. Governor Cuomo made his old friend Fred Dicker very upset, and suddenly started talking about "fairness" a lot.
Might this change have something to do with calls for fairness and a shift away from the "inequality is good for you" models of the past coming from the Occupy movement, including the folks he doesn't want on his doorstep in Albany?
He said the Occupation protests had nothing to do with his change of heart.
"My job as governor is to make the best decisions I can at the time to meet the needs of the state at the time," Cuomo said. "The role of government is to try and help the people of the state, bring a direction for the circumstances of the moment."
Maybe. Meanwhile, one of his predecessors, a ghost I'm less than happy to invoke on this site, is telling a different story:
"Occupy Wall Street has won, not that they achieved changes in policy, but I think that they have had a demonstrable effect on political discourse: What we are talking about, and what the agenda is most like these days," Spitzer said.
Spitzer added that he believed that, before Occupy Wall Street, nobody was paying attention to equity issues, the distribution of income and the inherent unfairness of the current economic structure.
Somehow I think protesting had an impact on the political conversation, even as it makes the very serious people nervous. The Three Men in a Room seem to have noticed that the conversation around them is changing, even if they haven't changed much.
Update: Apparently Cuomo's ex-wife agrees. |
