Eye on NY: Remote Income-Tax Time Bomb
Former commuters now working from home in New Jersey and Connecticut still paying account for a ton of New York’s income-tax take — for now, warns the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon. In 2020, “personal income taxes (PIT) paid by full-year nonresidents continued flowing as if nothing had happened,” though “very few of these taxpayers were venturing into” this state. “The non-resident share of New York PIT hit an all-time high of nearly $8 billion” that year (“up nearly $500 million from” 2019), accounting for $14.6 billion “of the state’s $54.5 billion in total PIT receipts in 2020.” But the questionable legal basis for taxing out-of-staters may not last: A GOP Congress might disallow it and Jersey’s “Gov. Phil Murphy began saber-rattling around the issue a few months ago.”
From the left: Too Many Secrets
“America has a problem with classified information,” argues The American Prospect’s David Dayen. “Tens of millions of pieces of paper are so labeled” but “the vast majority” would not “endanger the nation” if they were public. The cause: “Any of the thousands of people authorized to classify information has near-total power to do so” and so “secrecy has become the default expectation.” Indeed, in 2016 the House Oversight Committee “found that as much as 90 percent of classified material doesn’t need to be.” “It’s going to be hard to reverse this tendency,” as it’s part of our “hyper-polarized politics. But it’s worth trying. The lockdown on information is antithetical to the founding of the country, and does little or nothing for our personal security.”
Historian: The Left Now Is the Establishment
“The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist” but was “waged against — not from — the establishment,” contends Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. Yet “the current revolution is much different — and far more dangerous.” The left now “controls the very institutions” it once “mocked and attacked”: “corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education and academia.” Techies are “effectively Stalinist,” colluding with “the FBI, the Democratic Party, and the bureaucratic state to suppress free expression” and serving “as contractors of government surveillance.” We’re now “in anarchy, as institutions themselves have become nihilistic and weapons of the revolution.”
Feminism desk: Will Kat Celebrate ‘Oppression’?
After “Mahsa Amini’s brutal murder by Iranian morality police” for improperly wearing her hijab and “mandatory head coverings for the women of Afghanistan, who in their right mind will dare celebrate World Hijab Day 2023?” asks the Middle East Forum’s A.J. Caschetta. “The hijab has become a symbol of oppression,” especially of women; “it would be tone deaf” to celebrate it as Iran arrests and kills women protesting it and burning hijabs on social media. Yet three groups likely will: “Islamists, progressives, and gullible non-Muslim women.” That includes Gov. Hochul, who last year named Feb. 1 “Hijab Day in New York.” Caschetta prays that “turbans tipped” — a symbol of defiance against Iran’s ruling clerics — “far exceed the number of hijabs worn” by progressive women “cosplaying victimized Muslims.”
Libertarian: Flirting With National Rent Control
“Federal housing regulators are flirting with the idea of imposing nationwide rent control via executive action,” notes Reason’s Christian Britschgi, though it “would run into some serious practical and legal hurdles.” Team Biden just “released a Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights” and said the Federal Housing Finance Agency “would explore ways it could ‘limit egregious rent increases’ going forward at properties with a Fannie- or Freddie-backed mortgage.” But some former “housing regulators and housing industry stakeholders have criticized the idea for being both counterproductive and likely illegal.” Good: The Biden blueprint ignores rent control’s “history of constricting the supply of rental housing and reducing housing quality”; its proposal would “exacerbate many of the problems it’s trying to fix.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
