If you live in Bushwick, Williamsburg or Cypress Hills, the state senator who represents you went into this year’s budget fight with one demand: make billionaires, millionaires and big corporations pay more. The roughly $268 billion budget Albany finally passed, the latest enacted in 16 years, did not do that. The new taxes it added hit nicotine pouches like Zyn and luxury second homes, not big incomes or Wall Street profits.
State Senator Julia Salazar, a democratic socialist whose district runs across north Brooklyn, made the case early and kept making it. In a February statement she said it was “time to require that billionaires, millionaires, and corporations contribute their fair share to society,” arguing that “they became this wealthy because of the labor of working-class New Yorkers.” By spring she had taken it to the governor’s doorstep, joining New Yorkers at Governor Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan office to demand she tax the rich, an action where dozens of protesters were arrested.
For a moment the votes looked real. The State Senate’s own one-house budget resolution, which Salazar backed, proposed lifting New York City’s corporate tax on financial firms from 9 to 10.8 percent and adding a half-point surcharge on the top two income brackets, revenue the chamber put at more than $2.5 billion a year. The Assembly floated its own version of taxing high earners.
None of it survived the final deal. Governor Hochul had spent the spring warning that new taxes could drive the wealthy out of New York, and when the budget closed, the income and corporate increases the Senate floated were gone. The new revenue in the enacted budget came instead from a 75 percent tax on nicotine pouches and a surcharge on multimillion-dollar second homes, the pied-a-terre levy being Hochul’s own counter to a millionaire’s tax. The bigger idea Salazar co-sponsors, a Billionaire Mark-to-Market Tax Act that would tax the unrealized gains of New Yorkers worth $1 billion or more, and which its backers estimate could raise about $23 billion in its first year, never left the Senate’s Budget and Revenue Committee.
That is the gap worth sitting with. Your senator and her chamber went on record to tax Wall Street and billionaires, and the budget that runs the state for the next year did neither, leaning instead on one-time rebate checks, a nicotine-pouch tax and a second-home surcharge. The fight did not end in May. It resets with next year’s budget, and the billionaire bill is still parked in committee.
If you want a say, you can read S165, the Billionaire Mark-to-Market Tax Act, on the State Senate’s site and register your support or opposition right on the bill page, and Salazar’s district and Albany offices take constituent comment on what she should push for in the next round. Both are where the next version of this fight gets decided.
Featured image: NY Senate Photo / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
