Gov. Cuomo offered an alarming picture yesterday of New York’s post-Sandy fiscal situation; happily, he seems set on avoiding tax hikes to deal with it.
That’s commendable. And all the more so given the huge pressure he’s sure to face to wring yet more tax dollars from the “rich.”
Cuomo said it would cost some $32 billion to restore New York to its pre-storm state, and another $9 billion to buttress it from future storms.
And those numbers, he said, are only likely to grow.
Insisting that Congress should be ready to ship billions to New York pronto, Cuomo argued that Sandy was more “impactful” than Hurricane Katrina.
Some 300,000-plus homes were damaged or destroyed statewide, he noted, and 265,000 businesses. The MTA alone took a whopping $5 billion wallop.
But Cuomo rejected the idea that state taxpayers should, or even could, shoulder the burden by themselves. He insisted any new levies would “incapacitate” the state.
“Tax increases,” he said, “are always a last, last, last resort.”
He has said that before — only a year ago, in fact — and don’t you just know it but that last, last, last resort situation developed.
But that was then, and this is now.
Cuomo’s statements backed up a report by The Post’s Fredric U. Dicker yesterday that the governor would steer clear of tax hikes, despite Sandy’s hit.
Instead, he seems to be counting on efforts to restrain spending growth, along with massive federal aid.
Resisting tax hikes is certainly an impressive impulse — and not just because of the severe strain of the rebuilding costs.
Remember, voters this month clearly embraced “soak the rich” policies, both in New York and nationally. That’s surely emboldened big-spending pols.
President Obama, for example, made tax hikes on the wealthy a centerpiece of his re-election bid. In New York, Democrats picked up key legislative seats.
At one point, all of the candidates expected to run for mayor in the city have backed hefty new surcharges on the “rich.”
Yet, as we often note, New York’s sky-high taxes sap its economy, killing jobs and chasing away the very tax revenue the pols so badly want to spend.
Cuomo once agreed with us about that.
Now he seems to be remembering his own words: “New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation. Our young people will not stay. Our business[es] will not come,” he said last year.
“Put it simply,” Cuomo said. “The people of this state cannot afford to pay any more taxes — period.”
Cuomo was right then. And he still is.
Sandy — powerful as she was — didn’t change that one bit.