The just-enacted federal tax increase will fall heavily on high-income New Yorkers  – but will take a much smaller bite out of the Empire State’s tax base than President Barack Obama had been seeking.

The bill preserves President George W. Bush’s income tax cuts for the vast majority of households while raising the top federal income tax rate, from 35 percent back to the pre-Bush level of 39.6 percent, on taxable incomes of $400,000 for single filers to $450,000 for married joint filers. This effectively translates into gross household incomes of $450,000 to over $500,000, respectively.

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Governor Andrew Cuomo today finally got around to announcing most of the members of the “Tax Reform and Fairness Commission,” which he first promised to create a year ago as part of the legislative deal that temporarily extended the state’s income tax hike on million-dollar earners.

The list of commission members is headed by former state Comptroller Carl McCall, the Cuomo-appointed chairman of the State University of New York board, and includes two other current Cuomo administration members, Tax Commissioner Thomas H. Mattox and J. Patrick Barrett, chairman of the Olympic Regional Development Authority.

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The prices of some previously high-flying stocks such as Apple recently have been plummeting, and the stock market has just suffered “its worst week of declines in five months,” the Wall Street Journal reports. This is not good news for savers and investors — but it may be causing sighs of relief in some corners of the state Capitol.

The state Division of the Budget is counting on a Wall Street stock sell-off to meet its financial plan target for state personal income tax (PIT) collections in the current fiscal year.  As of September, at the midway point in the state fiscal year, PIT receipts were below forecast. However, the 2012-13 financial plan assumed the year will end with a big increase in what are known as “extension payments” for tax year 2012. This, the Enacted Financial Plan says, “reflects an assumption of early realization of capital gains due to the projected sunset of the Bush tax cuts as scheduled starting with tax year 2013.”

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The combined state and local tax burden on New York residents in 2010, the year before Governor Andrew Cuomo took office, reached its highest level since 1994, the last year his father held the same office, as measured by data released today by the Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C. Relative to the national average, the tax burden on New Yorkers has grown since the start of the recession, according to the same Tax Foundation analysis.

After dipping to third place in 2008 and second in 2009, New Yorkers once again rank as the most heavily taxed people in the country as of 2010, the Tax Foundation said.  The combined per-capita state and local tax burden on New York residents was estimated by the foundation at 12.8 percent of per-capita income — up from 12.1 percent in 2009, and the highest level since Mario Cuomo’s last year as governor.  The New York tax burden was about 31 percent higher than the national average in 2010.

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“The first casualty of war is always the truth,” Winston Churchill observed. The same might be said of political battles.  Around New York in this campaign season, incumbent state legislators in both parties have been bending facts into pretzels when they discuss their recent records on state taxes, in particular.

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Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has jumped on the bandwagon in favor of raising New York City’s top resident income tax rate — just a day after two undeclared 2013 mayoral candidates, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and then-City Comptroller William Thompson stepped (somewhat gingerly) off it.

Back in 2009, both Quinn and Thompson advocated raising the New York City resident income tax on high-income households.  More recently, different plans to raise the top rate have also been floated by three other prospective Democratic candidates — Comptroller john Liu, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and, most recently, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.

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New York ranks 50th — meaning “worst” — in the Tax Foundation’s 2013 State Business Tax Index, released today.  The Empire State’s ranking tumbled back to last place after climbing all the way up to number 48 in the 2011 Index.

As in previous rankings by the Washington, D.C.-based group, the Tax Foundation says the biggest negative in New York’s climate for business is its personal income tax.  New York looks particularly burdensome in this category (2013 ranking: 50) because the index’s weighting of taxes include local income taxes, and New York City imposes the heaviest local income tax in the country.  And it will get worse, if the the city’s leading Democratic mayoral candidates have their way.

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State Sen. Tom Libous of Binghamton, deputy leader of the Republican majority in the Legislature’s upper house, has been running a campaign commercial that takes credit for working with Governor Andrew Cuomo to enact, among other things, “the largest middle-class tax cut in 58 years.”

Libous cooperated with Cuomo, all right, but the senator’s characterization of the tax cut is simply not accurate. Last December’s tax package — which expires at the end of 2014 and which, on a net basis, raised income tax revenues by almost $1.9 billion — did not deliver the largest middle-class tax cut in 58, or 38, or 28, or even just eight years. By historical standards, the bill’s marginal rate cuts for lower brackets were not especially “large” at all. In percentage terms, they were among the smallest income tax cuts to have been enacted by New York since the state began a concerted effort to reduce marginal rates in the late 1970s.

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New York’s economy would be hit especially hard by Washington’s potential “Taxmageddon” — the scheduled end-of-year expiration of the Bush income tax cuts and of a temporary “patch” that prevents the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) from hitting more middle-class taxpayers, according to a just-posted analysis from the Tax Foundation.

A one-year extension of current federal tax provisions, as proposed by Republicans in the House of Representatives, would save New Yorkers nearly $51 billion next year — more than residents of any state except California, the Tax Foundation estimated.  The impact of the one-year extender would equate to 8 percent of personal income in New York, which would be more than any other state and triple the national average impact.

Most of the potential — $31 billion, or $2,100 per taxpayer in the case of New York — would be generated by another patch on the AMT, which has its greatest impact in New York and other high-income, high-tax states.

New York’s combined state and local sales tax rate is the seventh highest in the nation, according to a new report from the Tax Foundation.

Because different states can have separate local sales tax rates and tax sharing arrangements, the D.C.-based Tax Foundation uses a formula to establish an average rate for each state.  Although the combined rate in New York ranges from 7 to 8.75 percent depending on the county, the Tax Foundation pegs the statewide average at at 8.48 percent.  Based on the foundation’s rankings, here’s how New York’s sales tax stacks up against those of neighboring states:

Of course, the sales tax rate alone is not the only indicator of the tax burden. The tax base — how broadly the tax applies to different goods and services, such as groceries and clothing — is also important. According to figures cited in the recent report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force, New York’s sales tax breadth was 26.2 percent of personal income as of 2010, which was narrower than the national norm of 34.5 percent.  New Jersey had an even narrower base, estimated at 25.3 percent of personal income.