State Aid Instead Of Tax Cuts
-
- January
- 29
Gov. David Paterson said he supports measures in the federal stimulus package to help states, but he questioned the need for additional tax cuts.
The $819 billion package approved by the House yesterday includes about $275 billion in tax cuts, which is expected to put about $20 a month more into middle-class workers’ paychecks.
Paterson said the tax cuts won’t stimulate the economy.
“If you give people a tax cut, they are holding the money. If you give people rebates, they are saving the money,” Paterson said on WVTL 1570-AM in Amsterdam this morning. “This could drive us into a 10-year recession; this is what happened to Japan. We’ve got to get people to work, we have to get people spendingmoney again.”
He added, “I think a tax cut is fine, but I don’t think it’s the right formula we’re using right now. So I don’t really agree with the president on that.”
Later on Utica radio station WIBX 950-AM, Paterson said more money should go to states, who could use the money to offset tax and fee increases. Paterson is proposing 137 new taxes and fees in his 2009-10 budget.
“The tax cut I think is so small it won’t make a difference,” he said. “And the state is now raising fees in our deficit reduction plan. Then the citizen doesn’t know the difference.”
But he did praise the aid to states in the package, as well as the roughly $30 billion in it for instrastructure projects. Paterson said about 40 projects in the state are “shovel ready projects that could start tomorrow.”
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 12:29 pm by Joseph Spector.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
