Gov. Cuomo was talking taxes again yesterday — but, alas, this time his lips were not easy to read.
There’s Trouble in River City. With a capital “T.”
And that stands for Tax Hikes.
Indeed, The Post’s Fredric U. Dicker asked Cuomo point blank if he was sticking to his long-running no-new-taxes pledge.
“Are you ruling out an increase in taxes?” Dicker asked.
Responded the gov, disingenuously: “I have not decided on the economic program for the state — part of which will be how do you use the tax code to create jobs.”
Huh? We thought Cuomo already knew what New York’s astronomical taxes do to jobs:
“You are kidding yourself if you think you can be one of the highest-taxed states in the nation, have a reputation for being anti-business — and have a rosy economic future,” he said back in October.
Cuomo got it. Taxes kill jobs.
Fact is, nowhere else in all of America do state and local income taxes top New York’s extremist maximum rate of 12.62 percent.
New York is known far and wide as the Tax Capital of the World. And much of the economy is a desert because of it.
Cuomo himself has said so. “What has been the knee-jerk response in New York” to budget gaps? “Raise taxes,” he said in January — vowing, cross his heart: “Those days are over.”
Yet yesterday, he couldn’t bring himself to say, simply, what he’s said all along — that he’s keeping his vow:
That he won’t raise taxes.
And, later, a spokesman confessed that the gov is not “unequivocally” ruling out tax hikes.
So too bad for all those voters, us included, who backed him for governor last year in the expectation that he would keep his word.
And who believed him still in October.
Extremely naive, we all were.
For sure, Cuomo and his budgeteers may not have worked out the details, but it’s pretty clear which way the wind is blowing.
And it’s horrific news for New York.
Cuomo attempted to make what can only be termed a pro-tax case yesterday: “If you use the tax code right,” he said, “it’s a potent economic generator. If you use it incorrectly, you can stifle business.”
But how does he know, exactly?
He has no frame of reference.
For at least two generations, beginning with Nelson Rockefeller, New York has only raised taxes.
It has never cut them, except on the margins, and even then but temporarily.
Which sure as hell stifled business — hundreds
of thousands of well-paying jobs disappeared into vapor.
So why is Cuomo contemplating another tax hike? To succor New York’s powerful public-sector unions, mostly.
And what will he do next year, when Albany faces more red ink? Raise taxes again?
To be sure, Cuomo claimed that his first priority is the economy and job-creation.
His tax plan, he said, is “a jobs plan, an economic plan.”
But raising taxes doesn’t create jobs.
It kills them.
Once upon a time, Andrew Cuomo’s lips said that.
Could it be that he was fibbing?