Matters of Opinion

I've been a journalist for 30 years and two months. And nobody can tee me off more than a journalist.

Yesterday the New York Working Families Party and others opposed to Gov. David Paterson's property tax cap plan organized a conference call for reporters and editorial writers. They rounded up a few experts and advocates to explain why, in their view, the plan that's been passed by the Senate and is now before the Assembly would be bad for schools, bad for students and even, despite what cap advocates would claim, bad for most taxpayers. They had numbers and policy arguments and worst-case scenarios from Massachusetts and California. Then they opened it up to questions from the media.

And the questions were: How is this issue going to affect Paterson politically? Will he lose the endorsement of the Working Families Party? How about support from the state's politically powerful labor unions?

Hello?!? The WFP wanted to talk about how much you might pay in taxes and whether your neighborhood school is going to slide further down the drain as a result. And we journalists wanted to turn it into yet another political handicapping story?!? Not, is this good for the reader, but is it bad for the governor? Yikes. [I knew a very good reporter named Wayne who had an important reminder taped to his computer terminal for him to consider about every article he wrote. It was not "How will this affect the governor?" but "How will this affect Wayne?"]

About then the conference call started having technical difficulties, so hung up. I asked my questions later when a representative of the WFP called around to see if any of us had (he didn't say it this way) any real questions about the issue.

Well, OK. The fact that labor is opposed to the tax cap is significant. But it's also universally known. How about some questions about tax policy and education spending? If no tax cap, then what? Will the proposed alternative, a "circuit breaker" scheme to lower taxes for middle class homeowners, really work? And how will it help renters? Does depending on more state aid, covered by boosting income taxes on the rich, really add up? Will a tax cap that doesn't cut anything, just puts a limit on the rate of tax hikes, really help the taxpayers or hurt the schools? ["Both the advantages of and the obstacles to zero-gravity sex are vastly overrated." - Arthur C. Clarke]

I still don't know. But the WFP information is here. The report of the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief -- the Suozzi Commission -- which floated the idea of a tax cap in the first place is here. [Note that the Suozzi Commission said that a tax cap must be accompanied with an increase in state aid to schools, which is not part of the tax cap bill.]

-- George Pyle/Editorial Writer