Mayor de Blasio has a mission. “I have a mission,” he said yesterday at a City Hall press conference. “The people of this city have given me a mission. They have entrusted me with a mission to achieve this plan.”
Is it to lift up the disenfranchised and the disheartened and the disempowered? He surely wants all these, but no, they are not his “mission.”
Wait, you’ve got it: His mission is to create a universal pre-kindergarten program! Right?
Not really, no.
Note that the mayor said the voters have entrusted him with a mission “to achieve this plan.” The plan is universal pre-K.
So what’s the mission?
The “mission” is to raise taxes on New Yorkers who make more than $500,000 per year to pay for his plan.
The mayor was talking about about Gov. Cuomo’s proposal to create universal pre-K across the state without raising taxes.
Now, if universal pre-K were the mission, yesterday would have been a day for de Blasio to declare victory and feel he had achieved something extraordinary. Universal pre-K was his major electoral priority, and within three weeks of his inauguration, he had gotten the state’s most powerful Democrat not only to take it on but to find a funding stream for it.
For most politicians, that would be the ultimate win: He gets what he wants without having to arrange to pay for it himself, and having forced the state to shoulder the burden rather than the city.
Not for de Blasio, though. “It’s a commendable proposal,” he said rather condescendingly, but made it clear it was insufficient and that he would not settle for it. His mission must be accomplished, and it won’t be if Cuomo gets his way.
Look, there’s something strange going on between these two men — and as far as smoke-filled-room politics go, the strangeness is mostly coming from Cuomo. The governor has greeted his fellow Democrat’s victory in the New York mayor’s race as a challenge and potential threat rather than the elevation of a potential ally in a key position.
Cuomo hasn’t adopted universal pre-K because it’s a top priority for him; he’s doing it to box out de Blasio, to make sure he doesn’t allow a rival to rise on his left, and in general so that he will keep getting the headlines.
It is conceivable, however, that Cuomo is also motivated by a different fear — that de Blasio’s hunger for tax increases in New York City will have frightening long-term consequences for the city’s and the state’s financial health.
Back in 2009, Mayor Bloomberg expressed concern about a city tax increase because of the possibility that it might cause an exodus of the very wealthy. Even a tiny shift in the population of the city’s top taxpayers could have a relatively ruinous effect, he said.
“Fifty-one, 52 percent of our taxes come from people making $500,000 or more,” Bloomberg said. “In 2006, 5,000 people paid 30 percent of the taxes in New York City. If only 1,500 of that 5,000 people move to Connecticut, that would cut 10 percent of our tax base, that’s another $3.5 billion.”
Think about that for a minute: 1,500 people move and $3.5 billion is lost. And that’s only to the city; the state loses those taxpayers as well.
The classic line used by de Blasio and others is that the tax increase he is seeking costs a grande Starbucks latte a day. “We think it’s fair and appropriate,” the mayor said Tuesday, “to ask those in New York City who have done well to pay a little more.”
It may be fair and appropriate and it may not, but if the overall political atmosphere in the city turns hostile to them, those who are most mobile can find an overseas Russian oligarch to buy their apartment and high-tail it 45 minutes away to Zaccheus Meade Lane in Greenwich, Conn.
Raising taxes of any kind always poses a threat of the ultimate unintended consequence — the loss of a taxpayer due to financial flight or the loss of a productive business due to a practitioner’s decision that it’s not worth the trouble.
Cuomo is not stupid; he knows New York state is sitting on the edge of a financial precipice into which it is not yet falling owing to the earnings of the evil top 1 percent against whom De Blasio’s brand of left-wing populism has set itself so squarely.
De Blasio is not stupid, either. He believes in that left-wing populism. He was elected to soak those rich guys. It is his moral duty to impose that tax.
It is his mission.