Subject:
Tell Lawmakers: The Ultra-Wealthy Should Pay Their Fair Share!
Message:
Dear Legislator,
As your constituent and someone who cares deeply about public education, I strongly urge you to support two commonsense revenue proposals that will generate revenue to fund much-needed health, safety and educational programs for communities and students throughout the state.
We must continue to invest in our students — from pre-kindergarten through college — by providing a quality education, access to mental health professionals and other supports to ensure student success. We must also continue to invest in the state’s health care systems and take steps to address food insecurity in our communities.
We can accomplish this by ensuring that pre-K-12 public school students have access to school nurses, school counsellors, school librarians, special education teachers, certified pre-kindergarten educators, childcare and aftercare services, art and music programs and by providing universal free school meals to students. Students pursuing a public higher education need access to dedicated, full-time faculty and advisors as well as classes that will help them to graduate on time. We need to fund programs that incentivize individuals to enter and remain in the nursing profession and properly fund the state’s three teaching hospitals.
In this time of uncertain federal funding, we as a state must continue to provide for our students, our communities and the educators that work with them. We must share our wealth.
The best opportunities to increase needed revenue without asking the working people of our state to give more would be to enact two tax enhancements that will: make permanent the surcharge on those with an income of over $5 million and $25 million as contained in S.4437 (Gounardes)/A.5435 (Solages), and increase the corporate tax rate to nine percent permanently, as contained in S.3943 (Gounardes)/A.5377 (Solages), both of which have been included in the one-house budgets for both the Senate and Assembly as recently as 2024.
These two tax changes would generate much needed revenue to provide services, while not affecting 95 percent of New Yorkers. The state must lay the groundwork now to increase revenue for this fiscal year and ensure our long-term fiscal stability.
Accordingly, I urge you to work with your conference and your leadership to support these commonsense revenue enhancements.
Thank you for your consideration of these very important issues and I would greatly appreciate a response to this email.
Sincerely,
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