Oh my, how easy! Our very tall (six-foot-five) mayor came up with an exquisitely simple way to raise money to fix the subway—tax the rich.
If you, as an individual, make over $500,000 per year (or over $1 million as a married couple) you will discover an increase on your taxable income above that amount to be a smidgen over half a percentage point—from 3.9% to 4.4%.
We have so many of these new rich (32,000) that this half-percentage-point tax increase is expected to raise $700 million in 2018 and $820 million by 2022. This tax on the rich will pay to give 800,000 less able New Yorkers a half-price MetroCard.
But why stop there? Why not increase the tax on the rich at the same rate we generate poorer and poorer people? That way, we can build nice, affordable housing for everybody and (my favorite) a New York retirement colony in Florida divided into boroughs so that people can’t complain, “I can’t move to Florida, this is my neighborhood.”
— George Capsis
