Metro

A bizarre win – for political hocus pocus

ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo offered a dazzling display of political jujitsu yesterday as he abandoned his pledge to end the “millionaires tax’’ in a deal with lawmakers that offers modest middle-class tax relief and lowers the hated MTA payroll tax.

Cuomo, faced with nervous Republican lawmakers afraid of being accused of favoring the rich and public-opinion polls showing 75 percent of the public wanted a tax on the very wealthy, claimed his flip-flop was necessary because the bottom had fallen out of state revenues.

But some close to the governor insisted that if he had any strong allies for a battle to let the tax — which he previously said hurt the state’s business climate — expire, he would have continued the fight.

Cuomo contended that he had discovered that the purpose of allowing the millionaires tax to expire — improving New York’s business climate — could actually be achieved by following the opposite path.

While the claim struck some as laughable, Cuomo’s plan appeared to be going over well, with endorsements from the New York City Partnership, the Business Council, the New York Farm Bureau, and Unshackle Upstate, normally anti-tax business groups, while other anti-tax organizations remained conspicuously quiet.

Cuomo’s deal was quickly backed by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau), both of whom won significant political gains.

For Skelos, whose priority is to keep control of the Senate in next year’s elections, the deal allows him to claim that he slashed taxes for 4.4 million middle-class citizens and rolled back the MTA’s hated-in-the-suburbs regional payroll tax.

The agreement also lets Skelos claim that the new “millionaires’’ tax is, for the first time, truly on those earning over $1 million a year and at a rate lower than they’ve been taxed during the past three years.

Silver, who is largely answerable to a coalition of leftist New York City lawmakers whose agenda is topped by higher taxes and spending, has been the state’s leading advocate of continuing the millionaires tax in order to pump up spending for union-backed health-care and education programs.

Cuomo, meanwhile, claimed a victory because, he insisted, he wouldn’t abandon his commitment to fiscal prudence. He vowed to cut state spending next year by $2 billion, even while raising taxes — on that small group of wealthy — by a like amount.

And while Cuomo will clearly damage himself with some moderate and Republican voters by abandoning his no-tax pledge, he can claim — with an eye toward a 2016 presidential run — that he pulled off the agreement with bipartisan cooperation that can be a model for the nation.

Just in case anyone missed that point, Cuomo pointedly noted in a statement that his agreement with the Senate Republicans “defies the political gridlock that has paralyzed Washington.”