FPI wants to keep millionaires tax, expand credits for low incomes

Retaining the 8.82 percent income tax rate for families earning more than $2 million after its scheduled 2017 expiration date, and an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low income families are among the suggestions that Ron Deutsch of the Fiscal Policy Institute offered Thursday with release of a study depicting the growing income inequality in New York as well as other large states including California and New Jersey.

New York currently pegs the state EITC at 30 percent of the federal credit and Deutsch said he supports a call by Assembly Democratic Majority Speaker Carl Heastie to expand that to 35 percent.

If the millionaires tax ended it after 2017 the rate would revert to 6.85 percent and it would amount to a $3.7 billion tax cut, according to Deutsch’s calculations.

The labor-backed FPI would also like to see more of the income tax brackets as way of making income taxes more progressive, or rising in concert with incomes. That’s counter to the flattening of federal brackets that president-elect Donald Trump and other conservatives have called for. “We want more brackets,” said Deutsch who also noted that New York State’s Top 1 percent in income receive 30 percent of the income generated.

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