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Just a year after the Empire State was clobbered by the coronavirus, New Yorks Legislature confronts an embarrassment of revenue riches. State taxes have rebounded more strongly than expected from the pandemic meltdown capped by a massive injection of $12.6 billion in no-strings-attached federal stimulus funds.

Yet among their budget priorities for the fiscal year starting April 1, the Democratic super-majorities in the state Assembly and Senate want to raise $7 billion or $8 billion more in new taxes mostly from a few thousand multimillionaire earners who already generate a disproportionately large share of the states revenue.

Gov. Cuomo opened the door to tax hikes in his mid-January executive budget, which called for a sliding scale of temporary three-year personal-income-tax surcharges on New York taxpayer incomes starting at $5 million.

Although Cuomo said the tax hike was needed to raise $1.5 billion, it has since become clear that receipts through fiscal 2022 will be billions higher than he originally projected. Indeed, his budget would generate a surplus without even counting stimulus payments that are more than twice as much as what he had counted on.

But thats not enough for the Legislature. Lobbied by a coalition of powerful public-employee unions and urban progressive activists touting a confiscatory tax the rich agenda as the solution to every problem, the Assembly and Senate majorities would raise the top income-tax rates to new historic highs.

Under current law, residents of New York City are subject to a combined state and local income-tax rate topping out 12.7percent 3.9 percent in the city, plus a statewide rate of 8.82percent including a supposedly temporary but repeatedly extended millionaire tax surcharge first imposed in 2009.

Both legislative majorities favor raising the top tax rate to nearly 10 percent starting on incomes of $1 million ($2 million for joint filing couples) and to 11.85 percent on incomes of $25million (the Assembly plan) or $50 million (Senate version). The combined marginal rate in New York City would thus rise to nearly 16 percent. On top of all that, lawmakers want to hit high-earners capital gains with a further 1 percent surcharge.

Lawmakers are turning a blind eye to the impact of the 2017 federal tax laws virtual elimination of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which boosted New Yorks effective marginal rate by 43 percent in 2018. The Assembly and Senate plans would raise the effective marginal rate on multimillionaire earners to nearly double the level of just four years ago.

Asked how targeted taxpayers might be expected to respond to this onslaught, legislative sponsors generally echo the complacency of Mayor de Blasio, who testified last month that hes unworried about an uptick in multimillionaire out-migration, because this is the place they want to be despite New York Citys well-documented increase in crime and disorder, the likely shift to more remote work and the tax hikes already resulting from the lost SALT deduction.

More than a few lawmakers probably share the attitude expressed by Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) during an online tax-the-rich pep rally last December.

Millionaires leaving if we increase taxes? Sepulveda said. Well, I say I will open the door and make sure it doesnt hit them on the ass on the way out. Because if youre that wealthy ... and if you dont have the heart to want to say, I will contribute more to help millions of people, then leave the state, find another place to live. Well find other millionaires that are chomping at the bit to move into this state.

Good luck with that, guys.

E.J. McMahon is a senior fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Read more here:
Democrats' bid to turn screws on New York's richest - New York Post

Had Donald Trump still been president, the stock market would have almost certainly topped his list of glorious achievements. We'd hear popping talk about how our 401(k)s are sizzling and how he is the reason. Sample tweet from August 2017: "Stock market at an all-time high. That doesn't just happen!"

No, Biden last week spoke of "a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us." He spent a good deal of time on the anguish, but then he moved, happily, to his administration's successes -- boosting production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, recruiting armies to give the shots, getting the vaccines into pharmacies.

It was a relief to hear a Democratic president bragging out loud about his accomplishments. But the message must move away from pain to prosperity. Biden has started on that path by touting the massive COVID relief bill that's sending checks to an overwhelmingly supportive public. His self-praise should expand to the stock market.

Democrats seem especially reluctant to use the stock market as a measure of their economic prowess. Under Barack Obama, the Dow hit record highs 118 times. Do you remember him ever talking about it?

Biden was basically right when he said, "Where I come from in Scranton and Claymont, the people don't live off of the stock market."

It's true that the wealthiest 10 percent of American families own 84 percent of Wall Street portfolios' value. The bottom 50 percent -- that's half of American families -- possess none or almost no equities. Last year, gains in the S&P 500 added an estimated $4 trillion to American portfolios, but $3.4 trillion of it went to the top 10 percent.

Many Americans don't understand that reality, as Trump knew well. Those in the middle who own a few shares, perhaps in their retirement accounts, do feel tied to movements in stock prices. Never mind that in 2019, the median portfolio size for households in this group was only $13,000.

Noninvestors, meanwhile, often associate a booming stock market with a good economy, even if they themselves are hurting.

It's odd how Democrats shy away from taking credit for bubbling markets, when, in recent decades, stock returns have done better under their presidents than Republican ones, Trump included. The Dow posted an annualized return of almost 11.8 percent under Trump, according to MarketWatch. That was good but short of Obama's 12.1 percent. And it was nowhere near Bill Clinton's 15.9 percent.

As MarketWatch also noted, even Clinton's numbers were blown away by the 25.5 percent annualized rise under Calvin Coolidge, a Republican. Of course, Coolidge had the Roaring '20s blowing wind in his economy's sails.

We're now in the 2020s. Many economists are predicting that with the virus in retreat, the economy will roar once again. The Financial Times cites such prods as pent-up demand, government spending and savings by the locked-down Americans who kept their jobs but had few places to spend money.

The stock market is off to a hot start in Biden's first year. We won't miss tweets like Trump's "Dow hit a new intraday all-time high! I wonder whether or not the Fake News Media will so report?"

But Democrats would be wise to at least applaud politely when stock markets sing of a new age of abundance now that they're in charge.

Froma Harrop is a nationally syndicated columnist whose work regularly appears in the Grand Forks Herald.

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Froma Harrop: The Democrats are finally bragging - Grand Forks Herald

Drug companies, including the ones making the vaccines now authorized in the U.S., widely oppose the move, which they say would undermine the global response to the pandemic and not have the intended effect of speeding up production. The Trump administration opposed it at the WTO. But House Democrats say they have already collected close to a hundred signatures on a letter urging Biden to change the U.S. position. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also have weighed in. Those critics accuse the drug companies of prioritizing profits over saving lives.

We need to make the vaccines available everywhere if we're going to crush this virus, and we need to make the public policy choices both in the U.S. and at the WTO that puts patients first, said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), one of the signatories on the House letter and chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

The WTO has been deadlocked on the issue for six months, and so far the appeal from lawmakers and over 400 health, labor, religious and other groups has not persuaded Biden to change the U.S. position against the waiver. Since the WTO operates by consensus, all 164 members would have to agree to support the measure for it to take effect. But backers of the waiver request believe a U.S. switch in their direction would have a transformative effect on other opponents.

For now, Biden administration officials only say they will make a decision based on their analysis of how effective the waiver would be. They also point to Bidens pledge to provide $4 billion in contributions to COVAX, the international alliance to distribute vaccines to 92 low- and middle-income countries.

The top priority of the United States is saving lives and ending the pandemic, including by investing in COVAX and surging vaccine production and delivery, said Adam Hodge, a spokesperson for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. We are exploring every avenue to coordinate with our global partners and are evaluating the efficacy of this specific proposal by its true potential to save lives.

The Trump administrations opposition to the waiver was a rare instance of solidarity with the European Union, which along with Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and several other WTO members also opposes waiving the intellectual property protections.

However, it is typical of rich countries, which host major pharmaceutical companies, to oppose any challenges to intellectual property rights from poorer nations.

The bloc of mostly developed countries argue strong patent protections have been key to the rapid development of the vaccines, and issuing a broad waiver would undermine the ability of the industry to respond to a future pandemic.

Top executives at 31 pharmaceutical companies, in a letter to Biden earlier this month, said waiver proponents have offered no evidence that patent and other protections are what is currently hindering vaccine availability, rather than the expected lag between developing the products and ramping up production to meet global demand.

"Despite the immense challenge of scaling manufacturing on novel technologies, current estimates are that Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers will supply approximately 10 billion doses by the end of 2021, enough to vaccinate the entire current global vaccine eligible population," they added.

At least two companies AstraZeneca and Novavax have allowed manufacturers in India, Japan and South Korea to produce their vaccines under voluntary licensing agreements.

But the World Health Organization, which supports India and South Africas waiver request, argues the terms of the voluntary license schemes being offered by some patent holders are not sufficient to address the current pandemic.

The Vatican, which has observer status at the WTO, has also jumped into the debate. Quoting Pope Francis, the Holy Sees representative argued during a meeting last month of the WTOs intellectual property council that the world should not allow the law of the marketplace and patents to take precedence over the health of humanity.

Supporters of the waiver hope those and other moral arguments will resonate with Biden, who is the U.S.s second Roman Catholic president and was photographed on his first day in office sitting in front of a picture of himself and the pontiff.

They also make an economic argument, saying any loss of pharmaceutical company profits would be more than offset by global economic gains that come from a quicker recovery, as well as the number of lives saved.

The next meeting to examine the issue at the WTO will take place over two days in mid-April. That gives Katherine Tai, Bidens newly confirmed U.S. trade representative, some time to dig into the issue. If there's no resolution, Biden could confront the issue head on later this year, when G-20 leaders hold their annual meeting in October in Rome. Both South Africa and India are members of the leading economy group, along the United States, China, Germany, France and the EU as a whole. India also could raise the issue when it attends the G7 summit in June as an invited guest.

Among major developing countries, only Brazil is openly opposed, while China has said the waiver request represents a good starting point for talks on any emergency trade measures that should be taken. India, a major generic drug manufacturer, claims the support of more than 100 countries for the proposal.

The WTOs new director general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former co-chair of the alliance behind COVAX, has suggested a third way solution to encourage vaccine patent holders to enter into voluntary licensing agreements with drug manufacturers around the world in order to scale up production.

A group of four Republican senators led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas also have urged Biden not to support the waiver.

"Waiving all rights to intellectual property would end the innovation pipeline and stop the development of new vaccines or boosters to address variants in the virus. It also wouldnt increase the supply of vaccines because of the tremendous time and resources needed to build new manufacturing plants and acquire the know-how to produce these complex medicines," the senators wrote.

But proponents of the waiver say the drug manufacturers cannot be trusted when they say 10 billion doses will be available by the end of year. Other estimates indicate it could be as late as 2023 or 2024 until there are enough vaccines to treat the worlds population, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said.

Time is also of the essence right now because there are the variants that are developing, Schakowsky said. The administration has made some moves in the right direction. But the real answer is to allow for the manufacture of these vaccines.

Read more:
Poor countries are fighting with drug companies over vaccines. Now Biden must pick a side. - POLITICO

Its really about Obama versus Bush, and Biden versus Trump, not the other way around, Mr. Emanuel said. We built long-lasting, robust economic growth. And I think comparing one to the other is, is historically not accurate. And also, more importantly, its strategically not advantageous.

David Axelrod, who served as a chief strategist to Mr. Obama, said he believed the current criticism was born of a desire to avoid a midterm shellacking similar to the one Democrats suffered in 2010.

It is irksome only in the sense that it was an entirely different situation, Mr. Axelrod said. If the Obama economic record were deficient, Im pretty sure Joe Biden wouldnt have run on it.

In many ways, the maneuvering is a stand-in for larger tensions within the party. Mr. Obamas close-knit circle is keenly devoted to protecting his policy legacy. A growing left wing wants more investments in health care and combating climate change, and a break from hard-line policy on immigration. Mr. Bidens administration is seeking to chart its own path.

In a recent address to House Democrats, Mr. Biden argued that it was Mr. Obamas humility that cost Democrats at the time, because the president didnt spend enough time explaining the benefits of his stimulus package to the American people.

Barack was so modest, he didnt want to take, as he said, a victory lap, Mr. Biden said. I kept saying, Tell people what we did. He said, We dont have time, Im not going to take a victory lap, and we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.

Excerpt from:
Democrats, Pushing Stimulus, Admit to Regrets on Obamas 2009 Response - The New York Times

Many Americans probably dont know exactly what terms such as anti-racism, cancel culture, racial equity, white privilege and systemic racism mean. And its likely even fewer could explain such concepts as woke ideology, critical race theory or intersectionality.

But these terms are now regularly invoked by activists, pundits and even some elected officials. Why? Largely because of two separate but related trends in American culture and politics. First, American institutions and voters, particularly on the left who have become more attuned and liberal on racial issues amid the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased attention on police killings of African Americans are now making a similar shift on other issues invoking equality and identity. That leftward shift is resulting in new initiatives and policies from corporations, local and state governments and, with President Biden in office, the federal government too. Many of these policies emanated from concepts like anti-racism and systemic racism that originated in academic or activist circles.

Second, many conservatives and Republican officials are now regularly invoking the term woke as an all-encompassing term for liberal ideas they dont like, particularly ones that have emerged recently, and warning that conservatives who object to these ideas are increasingly being canceled.

So its worth unpacking this new language and explaining what policies and values are behind them. This piece will focus on the political left and one later in the week on the right.

Ideas on the left that are ascendant

Here are 10 views, based on polls and public discourse, that are increasingly influential on the left. This is an informal list, but I think it captures some real sentiments on the left and ideas that people on the right are criticizing when they invoke the term woke:

These views are now expressed regularly by left-leaning people and Democrats particularly those who use Twitter, are involved in the Black Lives Matter movement and are under age 40. Books such as Ibram X. Kendis How to Be an Antiracist and Isabel Wilkersons Caste have become bestsellers because they appeal to people with these views and are likely pushing those who read them even further in this direction.

Perhaps most important, these views are powerfully shaping public discourse and policy. Examples include American news outlets describing the treatment by the British monarchy and press of Meghan Markle as part of a deeper structure of racism, with her husband, Prince Harry, portrayed as beginning to fully understand his own white privilege. There is also Goldman Sachs recent announcement of a $10 billion initiative to boost Black women specifically. And it is an increasingly mainstream and uncontroversial idea that America is behind other developed nations by many metrics, such as infrastructure.

The Biden administration has issued an executive order that describes ensuring racial equity and fighting systemic racism as one of its key goals, embraced a federal commission to study reparations and dramatically overhauled ICEs approach. It also enacted a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package that reflects the concerns of Sen. Bernie Sanders and other liberal Democrats that capitalism as it currently operates in the U.S. isnt working for many Americans. Cities across the country are reducing spending on policing or reallocating police funds to other services. Cities and universities are instituting programs to make up for past discrimination of Black people.

What most stands out to me about the American Rescue Plan is that it points to the ascendancy of certain ideas in the national discussion and the fading of others, progressive author Anand Giridharadas wrote recently. He noted that the newly passed stimulus proposal focuses on the poor (so not just the middle class), gives direct cash benefits to most Americans and reflects little concern about increasing the national debt, three shifts from the Democratic Partys approach during the Clinton and Obama presidencies.

Where these views came from and why theyre ascendant

On the left, we are now seeing the culmination of a number of movements and events that happened over the last decade: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sanderss 2016 campaign, Donald Trumps election, Trumps presidency, the emergence of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The Squad, Sen. Elizabeth Warrens and Sanderss 2020 campaigns, and the protests after George Floyds death during a police arrest. These events and movements built on one another. For example, it is likely the protests over Floyds death were so large, in part, because many of the people attending them had become more passionate about fighting racism in America because of Trumps presidency (more on this in a moment). Ocasio-Cortez worked on Sanderss 2016 campaign and then was a key endorser of his 2020 run.

The result has been a big shift in public opinion on the left many of the views I noted above were held by few people and even fewer major public figures like politicians as recently as five years ago. These views go beyond the increased number of Americans who said they are more aware of the racial discrimination that Black Americans face after the rise of Black Lives Matter and Trumps election. In some cases, these views were once so out of the mainstream that we cant find much pre-2020 polling on them.

Share of Democratic voters that support each position according to polling

Pre-2016 refers to polling conducted before the 2016 presidential election. Most of these surveys were conducted in 2015-16, but in a few cases, the survey data is from earlier. For example, the cash reparations number is from 2002. We tried to use data from the same pollster, to reflect changes in the results that were not due to questions being phrased differently. Positions with no previous response is the result of a pollster not asking the question pre-2016. That finding suggests an issue is new to the political discourse. For example, Gallups non-polling on the reparations issue from 2002-19 was telling.

Sources: Pew Research Center, PRRI, Gallup, YouGov

The woke trend has impacted the polling field not only in what types of policy questions we ask, but in how we think about core constructs of survey demographics like race and gender, said Natalie Jackson, director of research at PRRI, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on public opinion about questions on cultural and demographic issues.

Such a shift, as you would expect, has a number of causes. First, it is likely the Trump presidency accelerated support for these views, because of his controversial actions and statements on issues of identity and race in particular and the general trend of thermostatic public opinion opinions tend to move against the positions of the incumbent president.

Second, the COVID-19 pandemic validated some of the views I listed above and pushed many Democrats, including President Biden, to support more aggressive policy solutions than they had before. The disproportionate number of Black, Native and Latino Americans who have died of COVID-19 no doubt contributed to Biden putting racial equity at the center of his agenda.

Third, many of these views are evidence-based rooted in a lot of data, history and research. For example, the evidence is strong that Black people are behind white people economically in America today in part because of the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow-era policies.

A big part of this is white people learning the things they didnt teach us in U.S. history classes the reality of Reconstruction; the casual, celebratory nature of lynchings; the effectiveness of white terrorism against Black successes, said Lilliana Mason, a government professor at the University of Maryland, College Park who has written extensively about partisan divides in American politics.

We were not taught any of these things, on purpose I assume, she added.

Fourth, many of these views are hard to forcefully disagree with in public. Some of them have a very strong moral force. For example, its likely that people who are transgender will gain more rights in the next few years and decades in the same way that gay and lesbian people did it is easy to make a case in public that people should be treated well no matter their gender or sexual identity and kind of uncomfortable to make the opposite case without sounding prejudiced and mean. Many of these emerging views are about issues of gender, race and sexual identity, so those who are wary of them (particularly cisgender, heterosexual white men) sometimes dont feel comfortable directly stating their objections, leading to more vague criticisms (like saying these ideas are too woke.) But it is hard to blunt growing support for an idea if you arent directly stating your objection to it.

Many of these ideas still arent likely to be enacted anytime soon

At the same time, many of the 10 views I listed above are opposed by a majority of the public, with even a sizable number of Democrats in opposition. This is not surprising. Movements and ideas that challenge the status quo are often unpopular at first. Some of them eventually become popular (gay marriage, for example), some remain unpopular but influence policy nonetheless (the abolition of ICE) and still others remain unpopular and are eventually abandoned (extensive busing programs for school integration).

As long as those poll numbers remain low, its hard to imagine Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer or most Democratic mayors and governors will push many of the ideas forward in their purest form or even strongly support them rhetorically. (And those Democratic leaders, who tend to be more centrist than the partys activist wing, may oppose some of these ideas on the substance too.) So on reparations, Biden is officially supportive of a commission, but its clear that he and congressional Democrats are aware of the unpopularity of reparations and unlikely to push even the commission too hard. In terms of ICE, it seems like Biden will overhaul the agency but never abolish it nor invoke that language. It is unlikely Biden will give a speech suggesting that America is not an exceptional nation or that billionaires should not exist.

So dont expect most Black Americans to get cash reparations or for ICE or any big-city police department to be disbanded anytime soon.

Instead, over the next few years, we are likely to see Biden and other Democrats in elective office carefully negotiate with more left-wing people in his party. They will push Biden publicly and privately on policy, he will push back publicly and privately and its likely that policy will land somewhere between what would have been the Democratic mainstream five to 10 years ago and the lefts demands today.

Early in Warrens presidential campaign, in 2019, I suggested the Massachusetts senator would likely lose the primary but that her ideas and framing of policy might still end up shaping the Democratic Party. I think that dynamic has not only happened in the Democratic Party, but in a lot of other institutions in America: People like Warren, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Kendi arent in charge, but those in charge are implementing some of their language and ideas.

This could change perhaps public opinion shifts right with Biden in office or there is a backlash as some of these ideas are implemented. But for now, the woke are winning.

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The Ideas That Are Reshaping The Democratic Party And America - FiveThirtyEight