Local blog round-up, Part I
Rochester Writers has a great piece up on an issue that doesn’t get nearly enough play: tax inequity. New York State currently pays out over $30 billion more in federal taxes than it receives in federal services. That’s about $1500 per tax payer. Wouldn’t we all like to keep $1500 out of our taxes — or have it spent on local services — rather than it have it blown on Halliburton/“Bridges to Nowhere”/Denny Hastert’s real-estate portfolio?
This is an issue that most New York politicians — especially those of the Republican persuasion — rarely if ever mention, but luckily Eric Massa isn’t “most New York politiicans” and has been raising the issue. Here’s some more on the details from Rochester Writers:
This is the first time I’ve heard a New York politician mention this issue, and I’ve always wondered why it isn’t more of a hot button for New Yorkers. According to this 2004 accounting (pdf), New York ranks 43rd in the amount of federal funds that are returned to the state. Only 79 cents of every dollar that we pay in federal taxes come back to New York.
So, who’s on top? Mainly rural red states. Let’s look at one: North Dakota, which ranks 5th. For every dollar that North Dakotans pay in federal tax, they get $1.73 back. In other words, North Dakotans get a 73 cent free ride from people like us.
And where are North Dakotans spending our money? Well, one obvious place is their shiny new airports. Bismarck, the state capital, has just opened this new facility. Their old terminal was apparently so overwhelmed by the whopping 10 arrivals per day that it required an expansion. I’m sure all New Yorkers who travel to Bismarck regularly will appreciate how our tax dollars helped finance this beautiful building.
Bismarck_airport
Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that as a “blue state”, New York is going to get screwed by the “red staters” who run the Republican party as long as the GOP controls Congress. This isn’t just about replacing Randy Kuhl with Eric Massa — though, Lord knows, that would be a great first step — it’s about replacing the DeLay/Abramoff organized crime ring with politicans who care more about looking after the country than about paying off their henchmen. Randy Kuhl certainly isn’t the Don of the Congressional Republican mafia — he’s probably not even Fredo — he’s more the hapless small-timer who gets taken advantage of time and time again, but lacks the guts to do anything about it.
One more thing: while it is true that federal tax inequity has afflicted the Empire State for quite a while, the trend has accelerated as Republican power in Washington has grown. In 1981, when the whole catastrophic “Republican revolution” really started to pick up steam, New York got back 93 cents in federal services for every dollar it paid in taxes. That declined rapidly under Reagan, went back up somewhat under Clinton, and started burrowing through the floorboards when the Bush-Hastert-Frist axis of evil came to power.
The bottom line is this: New York state is never going to get a fair shake from Washington until we start sending people there who actually care about New York state.
Related posts:
In general, I’m ok with the concept of everyone contributing some so that “all boats are raised”, the way insurance works, but we gotta get rid of the large-scale, institutionalized corruption. Shared risk works, but we need to police it so Haliburton and Denny Hastert don’t take advantage.
[...] It’s pretty easy to describe: Kuhl drives around the district bragging about all the pork he’s brought home while strange music (a bit like something out of a uplifting but bittersweet Lifetime network drama) plays in the background. He claims the money he’s brought in totals about $250 million. As I’ve pointed out before, the annual federal budget is about $2.6 trillion, so a typical district pays out about $6 billion a year in federal taxes; hence, over the two years Kuhl’s been office, taxpayers in the 29th have paid about $12 billion in federal taxes. That means they’ve gotten about 2 percent back in the form of Kuhl’s pork (obviously, federal money has flowed into the district in other ways as well, though likely not as much as flowed out). Kuhl is wearing the same jacket he did during his star turn at the end of the ad he did against MoveOn. [...]