Like their New York cousins across the Hudson River, the rich or well-to-do of New Jersey are saying, “Yes, let’s pay higher taxes!” A group of them, led by Herbert Greenberg, CEO of Caliper Human Strategies, Inc., has embraced a project proposed by the “Fairness Alliance” for an additional three-year state tax on those with an annual income of $400,000 or more.
The proposed increase in the state tax would bring the tax rate from 6.37 percent to 7.5 percent for those earning at least $400,000, to 8.5 percent for those over $600,000, and to 9.5 percent for millionaires. A total of 50,000 households in the Garden State would be affected, and it would yield $1 billion for state revenues. “No one is being stupid here,” said Greenberg. “No one wants to pay higher taxes, but we’re dealing here with solving the fiscal crisis without removing social services from those who need them. We rich people,” he urged, “already receive quite favorable treatment from the federal IRS.”
Gov. James McGreevey at least formally opposes the proposed additional tax, reiterating his official position. His reaction was, “When times are tough, it’s not wise to resort to raising taxes,” and it’s likely that as a Democrat, he does not want to be seen as another Jim Florio, a Democratic governor who raised taxes, and for precisely that reason was later defeated by the “thrifty” Christie Whitman.
As for New Yorkers, a Quinnipiac Poll recently noted that 71 percent of those surveyed are in favor of a temporary additional tax for people who earn more than $100,000. Additionally, as Maurice Carroll, the director of the prestigious survey, notes, even members of that same income bracket are in favor of the tax, at an approval rate of 68 percent. But because George Pataki, for his part, does not want to be seen as a second Mario Cuomo, the governor hastened to repeat that—poll or no poll—he would not think of raising taxes for the rich, proving that politicians are always the last ones to understand the changing tides of public opinion.
For Pataki, the poll constituted above all what might be called a “one-two punch.” Along with the large majority in favor of the additional tax on the most well-off, the survey also shows the lowest-ever popular approval ratings for himself, at 43 percent.
However, not all politicians are as “unaware” as he is. If Republican state Sen. Joseph Bruno now finds himself disliked by Pataki, it is due to the fact that Bruno has clearly interpreted this new trend among New Yorkers, whether Republican, Democrat, Independent, or whatever they may be.
Bruno’s position in favor of raising taxes seems proof that by now, Pataki’s idea that tax hikes will only cost more to the state’s workplaces has become increasingly hard to swallow. Far from removing millions of “excess” dollars from for public health and schools, as Pataki has claimed to do in his budget, it is a disaster. It entails an even worse increase in local “downstate and upstate” taxes, according to the opinions that Bruno has taken care to collect, but which Pataki remains deaf to.
In saying no, as Pataki has, to something that has come about spontaneously in his state’s societal (or actual) heart, Governor James McGreevey finds himself in unenviable company. At least with McGreevey, one can’t put it down to “base” motives, as in Pataki’s case, in which his aim is clearly to protect his “anti-tax virginity”—whatever that may cost to poor New Yorkers—in the hope of being named the vice presidential candidate in 2004 by George Bush, who has by now made his anti-tax policies into a kind of religion, even if it entails a frightening increase in the federal deficit.
