ANDY: DINNER ON ME!
Wealthy woo-back
You bring the scharole, he’ll take care of dinner. Gov. Cuomo says he is begging well-heeled New Yorkers who’ve fled the city during the coronavirus epidemic to please, please come back some day — and is even tempting them with a home-cooked meal. “I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over. I’ll cook!’ ” Cuomo said Monday.
The governor — who famously boasts of his home’s sumptuous Italian Sunday dinners — said that he understands New Yorkers’ hesitancy to return to such a tax-laden city.
“You know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge,” he said, noting the wealthiest 1 percent in the Empire State shoulder roughly half of the state’s tax burden. His appeal comes amid dimming hopes that the feds’ next COVID-19 relief package will contain financial aid for struggling state and local governments. That stomach-churning possibility, on top of waning revenue streams, could translate to 20 percent cuts to health, education and local governments’ annual budgets, Cuomo and other state officials have said.
The governor has said he has no appetite to raise taxes for the wealthy, adding that it wouldn’t even be enough to cover the state’s growing deficit, pegged at around $30 billion over the next two years.
But he’s at odds with state Legislature leaders — particularly state Senate Majority Leader Andrea StewartCousins (D-Westchester) and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) — who last week argued that raising taxes on New York’s deepest-pocketed is something they’d support.
The Democratic-run Legislature has been working on an alternative fiscal package over the last few weeks, in case Washington doesn’t come through.
The dire picture is compounded by a city unemployment rate hovering at 18 percent, the possibility of more than 80 percent of restaurants falling short of rent obligations and fears that thousands of down-ontheir-luck renters could receive eviction notices within the next two months.