Mamdani's Estate Tax Will Suffocate NYC's Middle Class

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Rocket surgeon Zohran Mamdani has a new tax idea making the rounds in Albany: slash New York’s estate tax exemption from more than $7 million to $750,000 and crank the top rate up to 50 percent.

People think the eye-popping number is the 50 percent rate, which is clearly meant to sound like a blow against billionaire dynasties. But as is often the case with policies put forth by wannabe communist heroes and faux-academic sounding imbeciles with zero private sector or real world experience, the devil is in the details and the policy will harm those it claims to protect.

How? The real giveaway is the threshold. That’s where the proposal stops being a tax on the ultra-rich and starts looking like something else entirely. Because $750,000 in New York is not generational wealth. It’s a two bedroom house in Queens.

In fact, in much of New York City it’s barely even a nice house. A modest place in Queens, Brooklyn, or Staten Island — bought decades ago by a schoolteacher, a nurse, a firefighter, or a city clerk — can easily be worth that much today. Add a retirement account and some savings and suddenly the estate of a thoroughly middle-class family is brushing up against a tax that was supposedly designed for oligarchs.

That’s the sleight of hand here. Politicians love to frame these proposals as a crusade against the rich, but a $750,000 threshold punishes people who spent forty years paying off a mortgage.

And it’s not as if New York lacks estate taxes already. The state already...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, 100% FREE, HERE).