http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...fe3Wf1MzIqQoaO
Hijacking the ‘Cause’
Downtown’s continuing exercise in political self-indulgence yesterday saw demonstrators styling themselves as zombies intent on eating -- well, Wall Street fat cats, we presume.
Yummy.
The point wasn’t quite clear, which was also true Saturday, when several hundred demonstrators were -- to use their term -- lured onto the Brooklyn Bridge like so many sheep by the nefarious NYPD.
Mass arrests ensued.
The cops showed much patience -- we would have long ago deployed a pepper-spray cannon -- and the 700 or so detainees were soon happily tweeting the details of their respective ordeals.
Think of them as rebels without a purpose -- which is not at all true of the vastly more focused individuals who yesterday were attaching themselves to the demonstrators to push less ephemeral agendas of their own.
No surprise, but the municipal labor unions and their various front groups announced they will be marching tomorrow in “solidarity” with the Downtown demonstrators.
There will be commonality of rhetoric -- the horror of “corporate greed” and “inequality” and so on.
But they won’t be empty words for the unions: They are seeking to pave the way for higher taxes in New York -- in particular, for the so-called “millionaire’s tax” that eluded them during the past legislative session.
“It’s the right fight at the right time,” said Michael Kink, of Strong Economy for All, a pro-labor coalition openly pushing for higher state taxes on the wealthy.
Certainly, the protest’s broadest underlying fantasy fits well with the aims of many of the city’s unions.
“The crisis was caused by the excess of Wall Street,” a Transit Workers Union spokesman said, “and the consequences have fallen hardest on workers.”
That’s truly priceless: This, after all, is the very union that won fat salary hikes of 11 percent over three years -- just as the financial collapse was throwing private-sector employees (including many from Wall Street) out of work.
Talk about greed.
But the irony here is actually far richer.
Fact is, for years, the financial sector has been generating the very tax revenues that have paid public-sector payrolls.
Between 2000 and 2007, for example, revenues rose by 41 percent after inflation -- with much of that driven by Wall Street.
Banking tax revenues skyrocketed by some by 200 percent.
Without that ready cash, City Hall would surely have had to absorb multibillion-dollar budget shortfalls over the years -- with the public employees paying part of the price.
“The tax revenues that the MTA collected during the real-estate and credit bubble,” writes the Empire Center’s Nicole Gelinas, “funded the union’s pay and benefits packages.”
Then the bubble burst.
The public sector was insulated from the fallout, Gelinas notes, but “[transit] riders and small-business owners had to pay, via higher fares and a new tax on downstate payrolls” to keep the gravy flowing.
Now the unions want more, and they’re targeting the financial sector -- which is of critical economic import to New York.
Here’s the key point: That sector employs some 305,000 people -- many in the middle class. It’s the fourth-greatest generator of jobs in the city, paying out $80 billion in wages (about 24 percent of the city’s total) each year.
Plus, financial companies account for fully 20 percent of Albany’s annual tax revenue, and one dollar of every 14 that City Hall collects.
Yet another irony: To the extent that they succeed in weakening Wall Street -- the logical consequence of their rhetoric -- New York’s labor groups will damage their own pension prospects.
Union pension funds in the city, for example, total some $120 billion -- including $72 billion in equities; state pension funds total some $147 billion in investments.
Moreover, the value of those funds over the long term is safeguarded by investment advisers and asset managers at firms linked to, or associated with, Wall Street.
Meanwhile, the rise of public-sector unions and Robin Hood redistributionists has coincided with a marked decline in the city’s corporate dominance: In
1956, the Big Apple boasted
140 Fortune 500 firms’ headquarters.
Today? Just
45.
We don’t think the unions mean to kill that Golden Goose.
No, their alliance of convenience with the Occupy Wall Street flower children is intended merely to rough him up a little bit.
That is, to prepare the way for a renewed effort to pass a millionaire’s tax (actually, a levy on folks earning as little as $200,000) in the legislative session beginning in January.
If they are successful, the flower children will still be out in the cold -- figuratively, at least -- and so will New York’s struggling economy.
But the unionists will be fat and happy.
Think of them as the zombies -- munching merrily on what’s left of the Empire State.
There are no references for the statistics quoted, many of them may need to be fact checked, so YMMV. Additionally a (small?) portion of the fall in Fortune 500 companies can be attributed to the boom/bust cycle of the free market.
Linear Mode
