As a lifelong New Yorker and fan of Jerry Seinfeld, I really wanted to like CNN’s article,“Jerry Seinfeld is right about New York’s future.” The more I read it however, the more delusional it became until it was outright laughable. The author, Jeffery Sachs, attempts to explain why New York will not fail and he’s right that the city has had tough times before. He’s correct that there will be a day of reckoning. But he is utterly incorrect that this reckoning is “between the superrich and the rest.”
Sachs has decided to lay the blame of the current state of New York City on the feet of the highest income earners, outright suggesting that the rich have gotten richer on the backs of those experiencing financial desperation and hunger due to the pandemic. It’s not the elected officials. It’s not the rioters. It’s not the bungled COVID-19 responses. It’s the billionaires. You can’t make this up:
“NYC has more billionaires than any other city in the world — 111 in 2019. They like NYC, like the rest of us. They depend on NYC for their vast fortunes. And many have enjoyed astounding windfalls of wealth this year as frontline workers around them have died or faced eviction. The true challenge for New York City is not technology or even the pandemic. It is basic decency. A city survives and thrives as a living breathing social organism, one that acts together for the common good. The billionaires must be the ones paying higher taxes to keep the City’s schools, hospitals, public transport and social services running as NYC picks itself up from the crisis.”
What Jeffery Sach either fails to realize or purposefully omits is that the billionaires are already paying far in excess of any rational share of taxes to keep the City’s schools, hospitals, public transport and social services running as NYC picks itself up from the crisis. Highest income earners pay the top rates, including 8.82% in state income taxes along with an extra 3.876% in NYC income taxes. Add to that the 40.8% marginal federal income tax rate — and billionaires pay an income tax rate of over 53%! That’s 119 people paying 53% of their taxes for $8.5 million people and justice warriors want them to pay more? It’s not like these billionaires are using more services.
What’s really going on is that Jeffery Sachs is helping to shape the narrative that billionaires need to pay (more of) their fair share. Is it any coincidence that a new “Make Billionaires Pay” campaign by progressive lawmakers and activists is being debated right now in New York as some sort of a budget justice initiative? They want to add a new form of capital gains tax on those exceeding $1 billion in assets.
A fundamental principle of our American heritage and history says that you don’t take something from somebody just because they have it. That is the approach of a crook. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he famously replied, “because that’s where the money is.” Of course it’s a joke, but it seems like de Blasio didn’t get the joke. Crooks do that, not civil society. As Walter Williams said, “If one person has a right to something he did not earn, it means that another person does not have a right to something he did earn.”
Rather than cutting spending and government services, these fiscally ignorant crusaders take the easy way out and blame the very people who provide the vast majority of the income NYC receives–and then subsequently squanders through bad policy and abysmal leadership. But they aren’t satisfied. They want more. And unlike Jerry Seinfeld, that’s just not funny.