Opinion

The gasping golden goose

Here’s a promise: Turn on a TV this week and you’ll be bombarded by union-backed ads promoting still higher taxes for New Yorkers.

Here’s their message: Only by bleeding New York’s “millionaires” can the state be restored to fiscal stability.

Here’s a warning: Don’t buy the hype — not for a second.

Even though tax burdens dropped nationwide during the recession, the millstone actually got heavier in New York, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

New York’s state and local taxes rose from 11.9 percent to 12.1 percent of income in 2009.

Meanwhile, even as property values plunged 6 percent last year, homeowners and businesses paid about 5 percent more in property taxes statewide, according to the Business Council of New York State.

So New Yorkers now suffer the second- highest tax burden in the US, losing only to New Jersey in a photo finish.

Which pretty much gives the lie to every word of the manipulative ads from the state’s principal teachers union, New York State United Teachers — just one of many special interests pushing hard for taxpayer cash.

NYSUT demands that Cuomo squeeze

out a few billion more with a tax targeting “millionaires.”

But by “millionaires” the unions mean high earners — individuals earning more than $200,000 and families pulling in $250,000 together.

Now, that’s not nothing.

But it’s not millionaire territory, either — and it’s aimed at people who are already doing more than their fair share in a tax environment in which a third of all New Yorker residents pay no income tax at all.

People, it’s quite clear, who are already being taxed enough.

But what of those Wall Street fat cats?

Wall Street bonuses actually shrank 9 percent last year and are down about one-third since the boom years of 2006 and 2007.

The drop-off ends up hurting the state and city even more: Bonuses get taxed, so when they shrink, the state/city take shrinks, too.

The Tax Foundation numbers cited above make it indisputably clear that New York’s fiscal woes are a function of excessive spending — not insufficient taxation.

Gov. Cuomo has rightly promised to let the high-earner tax expire this year.

Despite the pressure he is under, he needs to honor that pledge.