By Joe Maniscalco

As far as many working class people are concerned, New York has become an increasingly strange and cockamamie place where shuttering neighborhood hospitals, stripping retirees of their traditional Medicare coverage, forcing older women of color to work round the clock shifts as home health aides, and selling off NYCHA housing are all treated as viable economic actions—but compelling Wall Street traders to pay their taxes and help keep the whole place from completely falling apart is just crazy talk.

A recently-launched campaign to convince New York State lawmakers to finally stop rebating the one-tenth of one-percent tax Wall Street traders are supposed to pay on their transactions is fighting to change some of that, however—and organized labor is seen as key to getting it done.

“We can repair crumbling infrastructure throughout New York City and the state, and much more effectively address the homeless crisis and need for critical public services in healthcare, housing, education, transportation, and public safety which are grossly underfunded or non-existent,” Ray Rogers, director of the End STT Rebate Campaign,  tells Work-Bites. 

State Senator James Sanders, Jr. [D-10th District] and Assembly Member Phil Steck [D-110th District] have already introduced legislation [S1297A/A4574A] to end the Stock Transfer Tax Rebate, but the bills have been sitting around in committee since last year waiting for the Democrats controlling every level of government in New York State to take action.

The campaign to repeal the stock transfer tax rebate recently sent out letters to members of the New York State Legislature imploring more of them to check out the Need Vs Greed website and to sign onto legislation, which so far, has 44 cosponsors in the Assembly and another 17 cosponsors in the Senate.

Rogers, a union organizer and activist with decades of experience in the labor movement teamed up with celebrated consumer advocate Ralph Nader to launch the End STT Rebate Campaign in New York.

If you don’t know what the New York State Stock Transfer Tax is, or why the roughly more than  $13 billion in revenues it generates every year is being rebated and put back into the pockets of Wall Street fat cats—you’re not alone. Lots of people are unaware the Stock Transfer Tax even exists — let alone that it was working great for about 75 years—from 1905 to 1981—after which time it started being rebated back to Wall Street.

Before that, as Michael Kink, executive director of the Strong Economy for All Coalition, points out, the Stock Transfer Tax generated billions of dollars for New York State and helped fund the State University of New York,  City University of New York, and Mitchell-Lama housing.

In fact, Kink says, “All the good things that were built in mid-century New York were funded in significant part by this small sales tax on Wall Street stock trades.”

But it’s no accident more people don’t know about New York State’s Stock Transfer Tax. Wall Street has put a lot of time and energy into either obscuring its existence or conditioning legislators left and right, generation after generation, to believe enforcing the Stock Transfer Tax is a recipe for economic disaster.

How far back does the propaganda campaign go?

Well, as Assembly Member Steck points out, all of the same arguments kicking around today against collecting the Stock Transfer Tax, are the same arguments levied against the tax when it was first adopted 120 years ago, and even The New York Times wrote op-eds denouncing it.

In March, NYS Assembly Member Robert Smullen [R,C-118th District] penned an opinion piece warning against his colleague’s Stock Transfer Tax legislation in which he said we are  “already seeing firms leave New York for the Sun Belt” and firms have “aggressively staffed up new offices located in Dallas, Nashville and West Palm Beach.” 

“I think the securities industry has done a very good job of trying to convey the idea, together with the so called Citizens Budget Committee of New York City, that somehow Wall Street would move if this tax were adopted,” Assembly Member Steck tells Work-Bites. “That has never happened in any place where the tax has been adopted—even when raised much higher than the rate that existed in New York, and we simply plan to restore now. And secondly, it's not an attack on Wall Street pay; the brokerage firms, the dealers, they don't pay the tax, it’s investors who pay. So, it's not a realistic fear.”

The one-percent, Sen. Sanders tells Work-Bites, are just very good at “defending their interests.”

“They hire people to come up with excuses of why the rich should not pay their fair share,” the chair of the Senate Committee on Banking says. “These people are very creative — I guess if you and I were paid their salaries, and if we had no morals, we could come up with with similar ideas.”

Chris Silvera is Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 808 and an advocate of the End STT Rebate Campaign. He also doesn’t think much of the old idea that insisting Wall Street pay its taxes will cause the stock market to flee New York City.

“It’s just like Yankee Stadium,” he laughs, “the New York Yankees are moving to Jersey, right? That [New York] name has more value [to them than anything else]. And when you’re not on Wall Street, who are you? I am a firm believer that this is something that labor not only can get behind—but can win.”

Indeed, Sen. Sanders says a campaign that “wakes up everyday New Yorkers” about the “money being left on the table” to fund affordable housing, mental health services, and a plethora of other societal needs is “urgent.”

“The people have not weighed in on this issue,” Senator Sanders tells Work-Bites. “And part of it is because they don't know the issue. If we were able to mount a campaign to go to the people and say, look, you and I both want better mental health services, we want affordable housing—we want all of the needs this society and that the polls say are very popular—and we let people know as it stands right now there's no money to do it but we're leaving money on the table—we’d have a more sane city.”

Rogers says, “It's one-hundred-percent in the interest of organized labor,” and particularly the public sector unions and building trades, to push for immediate passage of legislation to repeal the Stock Transfer Tax Rebate.

“Passage of this legislation alone would recoup an estimated $13 billion dollars or more annually into the state treasuries to fund infrastructure, healthcare, education, affordable housing, public safety and other vital services. Labor leaders who do not support Senator James Sanders' and Assemblymember Phil Steck's tireless efforts to pass these bills, which will benefit all New Yorkers, are seriously derelict in their duties.”

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