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To the editor:
Yes, "EMS pay parity would cost city $1.2 billion a year over five years." (Oct. 23 Chief). That amounts to $240 million a year.
You can be sure that the cost of other items in the city budget rise more than that. But it is always the cost of providing fair pay for city workers that is highlighted.
Unfortunately, Mayor Zohan Mamdani does not have the power to increase taxes on the rich. That's in the hands of legislature and the governor on the state level as well as Congress and the President on the federal level.
But despite claims that taxing the rich doesn't work, in fact, it does. That's why there was no problem funding government programs and paying government workers decently back in the 1950s. Workers'
salaries back then were much higher in terms of real money.
But for the time being, that can't be done. That's because so many workers have voted for people whose agenda is to cut taxes for the wealthy while keeping workers' salaries down. Most of the 77
million people who voted for President Donald Trump are actually harmed by his policies.
What's left for Mamdani to do? He must look to cut waste and non-essential items from the city budget to fund good salaries for city workers.
His move to replace the anti-worker Labor Commissioner Renee Campion with Liz Vladeck, who has a union background, as of Dec. 1, is a hopeful sign.
A funeral must be prepared for pattern bargaining. For instance, you can't say everyone must accept an annual raise of 3 percent if some are paid so poorly that wage hike percentages in the
high double figures would be required just to get them out of poverty.
Richard Warren
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Valete
"Excessive tax rates have proven counterproductive. That’s why President Kennedy proposed sweeping tax cuts—later signed by President Johnson—to stimulate a stagnant U.S. economy and revive capital investment. Without capital to fund capitalism, the social safety net dies.
Even Scandinavia recognized this reality: the majority of Nordic countries repealed their wealth taxes after discovering they triggered massive capital flight while yielding minimal revenue. Because economics is a social science, trial and error remains our greatest test."
Yesterday at 1:54 PM Report this
Admin
Valete/Word Man/Sica or whatever he'll be calling himself next week ignores the fact in my letter that higher tax rates in the 1950s did work. But facts never did matter to him.
Yesterday at 5:39 PM Report this
krell1349
Sorry Valete(Word Man) the rich need to taxed since a lot of them pay more taxes than I do. It's a travesty.
Yesterday at 5:48 PM Report this
reenjoe
Perhaps Robert Sica (JDonne, 0000, Word Man, now Valete) needs to change his online avatar once again.
I suggest Dooh Nibor - the Bizzarro world's counterpart to Robin Hood because Sica favors policies, like Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, that steal from the poor and give to the rich.
Yesterday at 6:29 PM Report this
reenjoe
On a more serious note, I agree with Sica's closing statement that trial and error can inform us what works and what doesn't in an economy.
Unfortunately, Sica is too ideologically blind to recognize that unregulated, supplyside or trickle down economics has been tried and has been a miserable failure.
Since "Reaganomics" was implemented 45 years ago, debt has soared from $1 trillion to $40 trillion, the middle class has nearly disappeared, wages have been flat, wealth inequality is the worst in history and GDP has floundered at 2% in good years. Those are provable facts.
Yesterday at 6:56 PM Report this
Admin
Wealth tax is only one tax. The top tax rates for Scandinavian countries range from 47 percent to 62 percent. As for the argument that taxing the rich does not work, it did work in the U.S. in the 1950s when the top rate was 91 percent. Even with loopholes, the rich were paying a lot more in taxes than they are now. Now I have mentioned the higher taxes in the '50s not only in this letter but in previous ones. But Valete/Word Man/Sica has a bad habit of repeating the same arguments that have already been shown to be wrong.
Today Report this
reenjoe
@ Admin, Not only are marginal rates significantly higher in Scandinavian countries, all worker salaries are negotiated by collective bargaining, even non-Unionized workers, leading to better pay equality.
It shows in significantly lower inequality gini coefficients in Scandinavia vis-a-vis the US. Scandinavian countries have gini coefficients around 25 and the US has a gini coefficient of 42 (0 being perfect wealth equality and 100 being a society where one person owns everything)
As I have pointed out more than once, what Sica calls "sweeping tax cuts" under LBJ was a reduction in the top rate from 91% to 70%. That top rate stood for 15 years until Reagan/Bush41 dropped the top rate as low as 28%. Those cuts not only failed to increase economic growth, they caused the worst recession since 1929 in October 1987. When Bush43 restored the low rates, following an increase by Clinton, the economy tanked again in September 2008. How Sica can ignore those facts is mind boggling.
5 hours ago Report this