Tag Archives: taxes

The Answer is Perfectly Straightforward

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New York City has sent letters to folks that city bureaucrats claim are pied-à-terre home owners that contain warnings of impending tax bills on those properties. Many of those homes are primary homes clearly held by their owners, and many others are primary homes that are held in trusts or by LLCs as entirely legitimate devices those homeowners use to mitigate estate taxes and to make things easier for heirs.

Worse, the city is trying to require the home owners to prove their homes are primary residences and not secondary. This throws into a cocked hat the American requirement that government must prove its case, not the one the government is charging or the one government is billing.

It’s true enough that trusts and LLCs can confuse, for some, the ownership of the residence in question. City bureaucrats and their boss, DSA/Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are among the some who are confused, and they’re whining about it.

City officials have said they don’t always have the information they need about a home to know whether it is a primary residence. As a result, they have sent out more notices to homeowners than the tax will ultimately apply to.
“Part of the point of this outreach from the Department of Finance is to ascertain whether or not that reflects a primary residence or not,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a news conference last month, referring to homes owned by trusts and LLCs. “One of the reasons that this is being done now is to ensure that New Yorkers have requisite time before the implementation of the surcharge.”

New Yorkers don’t need any time at all for the city to ascertain whether or not the residence in question is a primary residence or not.

The onus is on the city to prove it is not. If the city’s bureaucrats do not have the information they need about a home to know whether it is a primary residence, then they don’t know that the residence is a pied-à-terre, and if they don’t know, they cannot claim that it is. Thus, no pied-à-terre tax is owed.

The question is answered by a simple declaration by the owner, just as with Federal income taxes, with liabilities attached to lying about the matter, just as with Federal income taxes. And just as with Federal income taxes, city bureaucrats can, after the fact, ask for more information, but they cannot be allowed to assign ownership on their own claim and demand a priori the homeowner prove the contrary.

Of course, it may take a court case to enforce this requirement.

Dodging NYC’s Pied-à-Terre Tax

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Folks subject to New York City Democratic Socialist of America Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, and folks who aren’t subject but got the threatening letter from Mamdani anyway, are looking for ways to duck the tax.

offshore corporation in the Cayman Islands to hold their New York City pied-à-terre

Nope. Still a pied-à-terre subject to the tax. The owner’s corporation would still have to pay the tax.

pay a stranger to pretend to live in their second home as a full-time resident

Nope. That has other tax implications—income tax, for instance, as well as making the owner now subject to NYC’s landlord laws. And that’s apart from whether the owner can dodge the outright tax fraud aspect of the move.

There’s another way, guaranteed legal and guaranteed to get the owner out from under the socialist’s thumb. This consists of those owners selling those pied-à-terres to folks who want to live in the city, and for the now ex-owner stopping living there altogether. The city, anymore, as very little left to recommend it—even the finance industry is on the move out of the city, some out of the State—so there’s little loss here.

Lies of Government

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Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast—ADS-B Out—is an aviation safety aircraft transponder system that broadcasts, via satellite, an airplane’s location, altitude, speed, and identification number so that the FAA’s air traffic controllers can more readily track the airplane and its physical relationship with other aircraft in the vicinity. It’s an expensive addition to aircraft that was inflicted on sold to general aviation pilots on the government’s promise that the system would be used only for aviation safety and for no other government purpose.

The lie:

ADS-B gave them [government taxmen] an instant high-tech snoop tool, including the ability to claim owners are registering planes in one place but parking them elsewhere. Jeff Prang, the assessor for Los Angeles County, recently bragged to Politico that the county is using ADS-B to take the tax hammer to owners of 1,000 planes it claims have been “avoiding” “$35 million in local property taxes.”

Now we get ADS-B In, proposed in House and Senate bills, which allows pilots to see for themselves the aircraft around them.

House Republicans…used the revival of the [ADS-B] issue to remedy the original tax sin, forbidding any government agency from using ADS-B “for the purpose of obtaining revenue.”

And we get the response from the Left:

[S]afety means little to the tax officials wailing that they will lose this new “efficient” way to tax—as if Americans are obligated to make their jobs easy. It also means little to Democrats, who see a new front in the class war

It’s more than just petty taxman convenience, though. According to them, the money an employer pays an employee isn’t that employee’s money. It belongs to the government; the employee is merely a middleman on that road. Or, as that LA tax assessor implied, a highwayman needing handling.

Notice that it’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who are defending ADS-B Out’s use as a tax collection facility and who are demanding to use ADS-B In for the same purpose.

Why Would Anyone Want To?

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New York’s legislature has passed the Mamdani Pied-a-Terre tax; it’s the Progressive-Democratic Party’s latest attack on those Evil Rich.

The pied-à-terre tax, which was passed on Wednesday as part of the state’s budget, takes aim at second homes valued at $5 million or more and is expected to generate as much as $500 million annually in new revenue. It goes into effect July 1 and could add hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to the tax bills of some high-end condo owners.

New York City imposes some of the nation’s highest taxes on people and businesses domiciled there; now it’s going after those only resident there (I’d hardly call it living there) part time.

I wonder: why would anyone with the fiscal wherewithal to leave want to stay in NYC, much less be there even parttime? It’s rapidly losing its status as the financial center, with areas like Dallas and San Antonio growing in that industry, even places like San Francisco and Chicago supplanting various aspects of financial-ness. Regarding cultural attractions, those in DC and, yes, Dallas again, along with San Antonio and Austin, and San Fran, again, and Chicago have attractions to rival anything in NYC.

To the extent folks want to be in the city parttime, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts all are right nearby as places to hang a hat; they’re each easy enough commutes into town.

A bottom, though, why maintain even a sometime abode in a city that hates you so much, whose ultimate idea of “fair share” is all you got?

“Politically Viable Tax”

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That’s what New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Party and Democratic Socialists of America Party mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking for in order to address the city’s budget shortfall.

This is yet another installment in Party politicians’ cynical (I say) effort to raise ever more taxes in order to cover ever more spending, or as so often is the case with Party’s resolutely profligate spending, to “chip away” at the budget deficits and resulting debts that Party’s habits create.

It’s instructive that Mamdani wants to raise taxes in whatever way he can get away with. It’s further instructive that he can’t—no Party politician can, it seems—conceive of cutting spending, if not overall, at least in those areas not part of his social(ist) program, in order to free up non-deficit and -debt inducing spending for his goals. Mamdani can’t even conceive of simply reallocating existing spending goals to achieve his social(ist) goals.

This ever-increasing taxing is what New York City voters affirmatively chose to inflict on themselves, and it’s a threat the rest of us face if we don’t choose more wisely in our own coming elections, from the national level on down to our city and village levels.