It’s an embarrassingly easy target, but I’ll join the
piling-on: With the new state budget, New York legislators have reached a new
low, giving tax breaks for big yachts.
And while it’s a small giveaway in the overall scheme of
things, it’s a nice symbol of how Albany operates.
Legislators wouldn’t increase the minimum wage, but they had
no problem with letting owners of big yachts avoid sales tax on any amount they
spend over $230,000. You don’t have to read any of the media reports to know
legislators’ justification: It’s a job creator. Promise to create jobs, and
elected officials are at your service.
Oh… and this particular tax break makes New York
“competitive.”
Some of us who inhabit a different world didn’t know that
tax breaks on yachts were a competitive thing, but indeed they are. Before the
state legislature came to the rescue, if you bought a $3 million yacht in
Florida, you paid less sales tax than if you had bought the same yacht in New
York. We’ve leveled the playing field.
What’ll happen if the Florida legislature gets wind of this
and lowers the tax down there? You don’t have to ask.
This is how we do things, of course, not just in New York
but throughout the country. Want businesses to move to your state (or your
county or city or suburb)? Give them a tax break. And other places follow suit.
And we dive on downward. And there’s less money available for schools and
health care and infrastructure.
(Factoid: Want to know how much state funding for the arts in
this region dropped between 2001 and 2013? Sixty percent,
according to the latest report from ACT Rochester.)
We could stop this, but that would require one of two
things: federal action, or an immense amount of ethics, fortitude, common
sense, and cooperation among all of the states. Neither is gonna
happen.
So we’re left with interstate competition over taxes on
high-priced yachts. And it’s no mystery how that’s going to play out.
The Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon, quoted in an Atlantic
article, noted that the yacht-tax giveaway is actually small fish. “As tax
breaks for wealthy individuals go,” he said, “this will be perhaps the smallest
one around.”
And in his own blog last week, McMahon noted this: “Of
course, the same sort of justifications are offered
for bigger special tax breaks in New York’s loophole-ridden tax code, such as
the $420 million-a-year Film Tax Credit. The
passage of the yacht exemption will only add to pressure for more ‘job
creating’ giveaways, like a proposed music production tax credit that failed to
make it into the budget despite a lobbying push from the industry.”
We can complain about plenty of things in New York’s new
budget, starting with the fact that so much of what’s in it was passed without
public discussion.
And despite everybody’s presumed outrage over corruption in
Albany, the budget includes a tepid ethics reform package: “underwhelming and
uninspiring,” critic Dick Dadey of Citizens Union told New York State Public Radio’s Karen DeWitt.
A statement signed by Dadey and
representatives of Common Cause, the Brennan Center for Justice, the New York
Public Interest Research Group, and Reinvent Albany warned that “these steps
are simply insufficient to fully address the parade of scandals that have
engulfed Albany and will do little to restore the public’s growing cynicism
about its own government.”
We all know it takes all kinds of wheeling and dealing to
create the sausage that is the state budget. To get good things, we often end
up with bad things. But this particular budget says so much about where the
state is right now. And where this country is.
We know what legislators will say: They were there. We
weren’t. They see the big picture. We don’t.
We
just don’t understand.
Nope. We don’t.
This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2015.
