A dispatch from Albany in the metro section of today's New York Times quotes Andrew Cuomo's campaign manager as claiming about New York, "we have the highest state and local tax burden in the country." The Times lets this statement pass without comment. Smartertimes.com certainly wouldn't quibble with the statement that taxes in New York state are high compared to those in other American jurisdictions. Smartertimes.com thinks the taxes in New York should be lower. And New York City has a host of taxes -- like the commercial rent tax and the personal income tax surcharge -- that we'd all be better off without. But it doesn't help the argument for lower taxes to exaggerate the problem by distorting the facts. In fact, New York's state and local taxes are not "the highest." According to the Tax Foundation, both Maine and the District of Columbia have higher tax burdens. The comparisons are available on the Web at http://www.taxfoundation.org/statelocal01.html. The Tax Foundation ranks tax burdens as a percentage of income. The Census Bureau ranks states differently, dividing state tax revenue on a per capita basis. By this measure, according to the Census press release (http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2001/cb01-127.html) and table (http://www.census.gov/govs/statetax/00staxrank.html), the highest tax states were Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Minnesota and Massachusetts. New York's state taxes were the 11th-highest in the nation, by this method of ranking.
American-Supplied: A front-page dispatch from Jerusalem in today's New York Times makes a point of noting that Israel used "American-supplied F-16 fighter planes and Apache attack helicopters" to strike at Palestinian Arab targets. No mention by the Times of who supplied the "M-16 assault rifle" and "two grenades" that the Palestinian Arab terrorist -- the Times calls him a "gunman" -- used to murder civilians in a Tel Aviv nightspot, according to the Times.
Seeing Double: The metro section of today's New York Times carries an article about a program by which Columbia University and Hostos Community College cooperate to train students who hope to become American diplomats. If this story sounds vaguely familiar, it is because the Times ran a nearly identical article about the Hostos-Columbia program on February 26, 2002.