Don’t fool yourself into thinking the still-small Democratic Socialist movement is the real force looking to send taxes into the stratosphere: The major menace remains public-sector unions, in New York and across the country.
And while the unions talk about “economic justice,” their main motive is their own greed.
Take a close look at Wednesday’s Tax the Rich rally in Albany.
Its backers include the UAW Local 9A (largely public-sector, not auto, workers), CUNY faculty’s Professional Staff Congress and the New York State Nurses Association — all unions covering government or nonprofit employees — or union front groups like the Alliance for Quality Education, the Strong Economy for All Coalition and the Working Families Party.
Strong Economy for All, for example, includes 1199 SEIU-United Healthcare Workers East, the Municipal Labor Council, New York State Teachers Union, the United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ-SEIU and more.
(Notably, Strong Economy’s chief is Michael Kink, a UFT “supervisor” who hauls in a sweet $210,980 a year.)
All these outfits profit from bigger government, even when they’re technically private sector, as with the health-care unions — and so want to tax a lot more than just the rich.
Thus, while Democratic Socialist poster boy Zohran Mamdani backs the movement, and co-sponsored the bill pushed at the rally, his big tax-hike ask as mayor is less ambitious.
He wants levies raised just two percentage points on high incomes; Tax the Rich-backed bills are much more ambitious, socking not just millionaires but even couples making just $500,000, who’d see their taxes rise a whopping 10%.
And top earners would face a top rate of 24% — the highest not just in America but the world.
Would that send many higher earners rushing out of state?
Sure — but that reduces any resistance to the unions’ power; they can then feed safely on all the wealth that remains.
It’s a similar story with California’s wealth-tax proposal, which would slap a 5% tax on net worth of $1 billion or more — i.e., $50 million in tax for every billion — on top of all the other taxes billionaires pay.
That’s such a strong incentive for them to ditch California that even lefty Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes it.
Indeed, many would-be wealth-tax victims — PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — have reportedly already sought digs elsewhere.
But who’s behind the wealth-tax push? Again, unions that feed off government spending — specifically, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West.
We’re no fans of the Democratic Socialists; they’re wrong about approximately everything — but the larger threat (and far better-funded, thanks to how they feed off the public) consists of the special interests the socialists so naively run cover for.
The entire crew is pointing in the same direction, namely to the ruination of New York, but saving the city and state requires seeing the dark forces behind the left-wing useful idiots.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
