Coordinating editor Drew Nelles emails me, saying (at the point in the email where he’s being the most constructive),
Martin’s source in his letter is a CCPA study cited in his original feature: “Why Charity Isn’t Enough,” available at www.policyalternatives.ca. I checked the study out on production night to make sure his letter was accurate, and checked it again after you emailed me, and everything he wrote checks out.
Um … no, it doesn’t check out. Nelles must have skimmed the CCPA study and what Lukacs wrote, since he came up with the pondscum from sewage Lukacs tried to dump on readers. The quote to which Nelles is referring in the CCPA study is
State income taxes in the U.S. are generally lower than provincial income taxes, but the heavy hitters on Wall Street have to pay a 6.7% New York City income tax as well as the New York state top tax rate of 7.7% — which adds up to a 50% top marginal tax rate [i.e., 6.7% city + 7.7% state +35% federal = 49.4% of their incomes some NYC dwellers have to pay in income taxes].
The first clause in the quote is incorrect. State income taxes are not “generally lower” than provincial income taxes, because this implies that they are sometimes lower, which is a false claim; they are always lower. Lukacs repeats the “generally lower” claim in his letter (almost word for word, without attribution), and I showed in the last post how the state with the highest income tax rates, Vermont, at a 9.5% maximum rate, has lower income taxes than the province with the lowest, Alberta, which has a constant 10% rate.
But the second part of the CCPA quote, about an extra city income tax for some areas of New York City, is correct. It’s just how Lukacs used it that made a false claim. Defending against people didn’t like his comparing the top brackets of federal income tax only, instead of including the large provincial ones, Lukacs wrote in such a way that he indicated New York state, not NYC:
While state income taxes are generally lower than provincial ones, the richest investors in New York pay about a 50 per cent top marginal tax rate – much higher than the richest Canadians.
Therefore, this needs an Errata, since state plus federal income tax in New York state adds up to 42% for the highest income bracket — whatever point the CCPA study’s author wants to make about New York City.
Sadly, Lukacs used the phrase “richest investors” in order not to mention NYC directly and to imply that he was not talking about a single tax area much, much smaller than a state/province. He did it this to directly counter people’s criticism about states and provinces …
(And in fact, the majority of the “richest investors” who trade their stocks or other people’s on Wall Street do not live in New York CITY, for reasons that include wanting to avoid an extra income tax and wanting to see fireflies on the beach.)
The Features editor prizes childish attempts at misdirection above respect for his readers, but this is an open secret at The Daily. Nelles has answered my question in the last post: Martin Lukacs did have something in print to point to that said “50%,” so he could be said to have “equipped himself with facts to [attempt to] support published statements.” Thanks to Nelles, we’ve also learned that the Features editor violated only the latter part of the same paragraph in the Ethics section of The Daily’s Constitution:
The contributors and voting staff should be fair and accurate in their reports, and must equip themselves with facts to support published statements. They must realize their personal responsibility for everything submitted for publication. They must not falsify information or documents, nor distort or misrepresent the facts.
…
To be fair to Drew Nelles, I have told him that he does have his virtues as Coordinating Editor. He’s not phlegmatic, he’s courteous, responsive and usually straight-forward. He’s a good writer, although sometimes I think his pieces are brought down by his becoming overemotional and oversensitive, such as in his Comment piece (rightly) criticizing Peggy Curran of the Montreal Gazette. At the end of last year, I hoped Kelly Ebbels would have ran for the position, and was suspicious that Nelles would confuse being an activist and and being an editor. That concern did not bear out. And I keep in mind that even if Nelles made a mistake in quickly scanning the CCPA literature and Lukacs’ letter, he did check Lukacs’ letter, at least, before it went to press.
