A New York commission examining tax fairness has proposed changes in the state’s sales, estate and franchise taxes.
The panel outlines proposals meant to modernize the tax system and make it simpler, fairer and more affordable.
They want to eliminate the estate tax on 73 percent of New Yorkers by raising the exemption threshold from $1 million to $3 million, saying it now wrongly targets middle-class taxpayers. They propose revising sales tax exemptions to help low-income residents, simplifying corporate and bank franchise taxes and annually evaluating business tax credits to determine their effectiveness.
The report released Thursday says state and local governments levied about $146 billion in taxes for the most recent fiscal year.
(AP)
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3 Responses
These proposals would ease (a little bit anyway) the financial burden on lower and middle income people.
But having a single tax such as sales tax only, would be far better still and much more fair.
Property taxes for example, needs to be eliminated, at least for those who
own a single home or small business.
No one “owns” their home when it can be taken away just because the family cannot earn enough (especially in this economy) to pay (especially an arguably arbitrary, and constantly increasing) taxes on it.
The problem with an all-in-one sales tax is that it’s easy to avoid (by shopping out of state) or evade (by paying cash to less-than-honest merchants).
Having all aspects of government funded only by sales taxes would require a sales tax rate many times what we currently have. It would destroy retailers who are near state lines. And it would bankrupt most communities, as they don’t have sufficient retail businesses to pay the bills of their schools and highways. Furthermore, much of the high cost of government in NY State is structural, with almost seven hundred local school systems and about as many overlapping town and village governmental units. Politicians love tax caps, or simplistic solutions like this, but the real solution is to make government more efficient and the voters in many cases would rather keep their horribly inefficient local governments and school systems.