Cash and carry

Lucky thing that the empowered and emboldened progressive forces in the Legislature didn’t get their way and impose $7 billion in new taxes this year. If they had, state coffers might be overflowing not with the current $4 billion in unanticipated receipts (equal to the actual new levies) but perhaps $7 billion.

And it’s too bad that Gov. Cuomo’s weakened political standing from swirling inquiries left him unable to fully stop legislators’ hikes. The $4 billion in new taxes was a compromise that wasn’t unneeded after all, as we and others predicted. This was a failure of politics and policy, unless the true goal of the extra taxation wasn’t to raise revenue but purely to punish the wellto-do, which is even worse.

But that was March and now it’s June — and the revenues are pouring in, as state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli reports in the monthly state cash report: Receipts from the first two months of fiscal year 2021-22 were $4 billion higher than forecast in the state’s enacted financial plan.

We have one easy idea for $1.4 billion of this bonanza: Giving it back to the unfortunate 4 million New Yorkers who lost their jobs last year and collected unemployment compensation and then were oh so wrongly taxed by Albany for the privilege of getting assistance. Congress had the wisdom and compassion to exempt the first $10,200 of those 2020 benefits from the IRS. New York could have and should have done the same. But Albany failed and the average person had to hand over $365 to enrich a state government that doesn’t need the money.

A state Senate bill to match the feds has 56 sponsors out of 63 senators and none of the other seven senators seem to be opposed, including Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. The measure simply exempts $10,200 in unemployment benefits. While the 2020 tax year has largely closed out, a credit on 2021 filings will make people whole, albeit tardy. Better late than never.