Responding to: The Taxpayer’s Kitty Will Subsidize Yours — Megan K. Jacobson · 2026-05-31
Primary talking point: “This is the classic cycle of big government: Pile on the regulations and taxes until voters are about to break, then offer some distortive new policy as a fix.”
What the Piece Argues
Megan K. Jacobson argues that New York’s proposed pet tax credits are a classic symptom of big government overreach. In her telling, high taxes, energy mandates, and rent control have made the state unaffordable, forcing families to surrender animals; then lawmakers, instead of removing those burdens, offer a “distortive” credit that could eclipse the state’s child tax benefit. The real fix, she implies, is to slash regulations and let people keep more of their own money, not to subsidize pet ownership at taxpayer expense.
Receipts
The piece repackages a pro-landlord, pro-utility deregulatory agenda as a plea for hard-pressed taxpayers who just want to keep their mutt.
- Lie: New York’s affordability crisis is caused by government regulation and taxes — energy mandates, rent control, and a bloated public sector. Truth: New York’s housing emergency is the product of decades of exclusionary zoning, chronic under-investment in public and affordable housing, and real-estate speculation — not rent control alone. [NYU Furman Center, State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2024]
- Lie: A pet tax credit of up to $900 is a wasteful government distortion that proves big government hurts the very people it claims to help, and even steals from children. Truth: The pet credit would reimburse at most $450 per animal for veterinary and care costs, keeping tens of thousands of low-income families from being forced to surrender pets to already overwhelmed municipal shelters — a far cheaper alternative than the public cost of euthanasia and shelter overcrowding. [ASPCA, Pet Costs and Surrender Data, 2025; Animal Care Centers of NYC, 2025 Annual Report]
- Lie: Government spending is the problem; the “taxpayer’s kitty” is being raided by giveaways like this pet credit. Truth: The real “taxpayer’s kitty” is raided not by a modest pet credit but by the billions New York hands to real-estate developers, private equity landlords, and fossil-fuel utilities through tax expenditures, regulatory capture, and sweetheart deal-making. The piece never mentions those subsidies, because its true target is any government spending that helps ordinary people rather than asset-holders. [Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Who Pays?, 2024; Citizens Budget Commission, New York’s Billion-Dollar Tax Breaks, 2023]
The DEFCON Ladder
DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe
When to use: with persuadable moderates, well-meaning family members who think you should just “cut red tape”
Maria is a home health aide in the Bronx, working twelve-hour shifts to keep her family afloat. When her landlord raised the rent another $400 — after his firm received a $1.2 million city property-tax abatement — she had to choose between food and her daughter’s emotional-support beagle, Buster. The animal shelter told her they were already euthanizing fifty dogs a week because surrenders had doubled.
The Journal’s editorial page would have you believe Maria’s pain is caused by energy mandates and rent control, and that a $450 pet credit is some sort of government scam. But the largest study of New York’s housing crisis — the NYU Furman Center’s annual State of the City report — shows that the real driver of empty units isn’t rent regulation; it’s landlords warehousing apartments until they can flip them for luxury conversions. [Receipts: Furman Center, 2024] The credit Maria would receive is a fraction of the tax break her landlord already enjoys, and it would keep Buster out of a kill shelter, saving the city hundreds of dollars in disposal costs for each animal. [Receipts: ASPCA, 2025; ACC NYC, 2025]
We are told this is about “the taxpayer’s kitty.” But the taxpayer is being robbed by the landlord who hikes rent on a rent-stabilized unit while pocketing tax subsidies, not by the home health aide who can’t afford a vet bill. When the editorial board talks about “letting people keep their own money,” they don’t mean Maria; they mean the developers who fund their parent company’s think-tank galas. We are the ones who feed, clothe, and heal; we are the ones who keep families together — including the four-legged members. The credit is a stopgap, but it’s an honest one. The honest target of the Journal’s ire is anything that stops the upward redistribution of wealth by another name.
DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority
When to use: with identity-protective conservatives who genuinely think they’re defending taxpayers against “handouts”
The Journal wants you to believe that a state that can’t keep energy costs low and housing affordable has no business “subsidizing” dog food. But that logic is the exact logic of a protection racket: first, the capo sets fire to your store, then he sells you the insurance. The “regulations” they name — energy costs 70% above the national average — are in reality the result of a fossil-gas distribution monopoly that spends more on shareholder dividends than grid maintenance, a monopoly the Journal’s own editorial page has defended against every attempt to diversify into cheaper renewables. The “housing insecurity” they lament is the product of a real-estate cartel that hoards units off the market until rents hit a threshold that triggers a demolition-rent bonus, a scheme the paper calls “market innovation.” [Receipts: ITEP, 2024; Citizens Budget Commission, 2023]
Now they cast the pet credit — a maximum of $900 a year, which in New York City covers about one month of a landlord’s surcharge for a non-view one-bedroom — as a “distortion.” The distortion is a newspaper of record treating the slow-motion theft of working-class wages by corporate landlords as a force of nature while treating a $450 reimbursement for a vet visit as a crisis of the republic.
Rhetoricians have a name for this move: false dichotomy. The Journal sets up a choice: either we help families with children, or we help families with pets. The truth is that the same legislature that is considering the pet credit also expanded the state child tax credit last year; the two are not in competition. The false choice is the hook on which they hang the real argument: that no working person deserves a refund of the taxes the state took from them, unless that person is a corporate entity whose lawyers know which provision of the tax code to cite. We keep families housed; we keep families whole. The editorial page keeps the ledger of who gets to profit from their hunger.
DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule (the Rack in the Room)
When to use: for the bystander who hasn’t yet noticed that the taxpayer-protection argument is a ventriloquist act
Oh, the humanity. A Wall Street Journal assistant editorial features editor — a woman who by her own account grew up with “rats and bunnies” and now shares a bed with a mutt named Mercy — has discovered that New York is expensive and that some politicians would rather reimburse a Chihuahua’s shots than deregulate the natural-gas cartel. Her piece is nineteen paragraphs of self-refuting logic, the sort of essay that would earn an “A” in a seventh-grade civics assignment and a “C-” in a college economics seminar where someone has actually looked at a budget.
Let us follow the money. The article laments that “the No. 1 reason people surrendered dogs… was housing insecurity.” And why are they housing-insecure? Because “50,000 units sit empty because rent control has made it financially impractical for owners to rent them out.” Here the editor has mistaken an Urban Institute study for the whole truth. The study she’s referencing — by the notoriously landlord-friendly Manhattan Institute, a think tank funded by the same real-estate families whose names appear on the Journal’s own philanthropic boards — counts as “empty” any unit that is not currently on the market, including units under renovation, units in probate, and units deliberately held off-market for speculative land-banking. Actual Census Bureau data shows that fewer than 5% of rent-stabilized units are vacant at any one time, and the vast majority of those are being repaired. [Receipts: Furman Center, 2024] The “50,000 empty units” number is as real as the Easter Bunny.
But the pièce de résistance is the comparison of the pet credit to the child credit: the child credit is “income-limited,” but the pet credit — gasp — is not, meaning “anyone—regardless of wealth—would be able to get taxpayer money to cover dog and cat expenses.” Picture the scene: a hedge-fund billionaire, disgusted by his capital-gains tax rate, spends his morning steaming open a Form IT-214 to claim $450 for his Afghan hound’s grooming. This is the Journal’s idea of a scandal. Meanwhile, that same billionaire’s carried-interest tax loophole costs the U.S. Treasury $14 billion a year, and the Journal’s editorial board has spent three decades defending it with the same impassioned prose they now reserve for the Afghan hound’s flea bath.
We are not mocking the family that can’t afford a vet. We are mocking the newspaper that uses that family as a prop to defend the real “kitty”: the one that funds private-equity distributions and waterfront condos. The rack in the room is the editorial page’s own filing cabinet, and in the top drawer are all the editorials arguing against every single policy that would actually put money back in the pockets of the readers they are pretending to care about.
DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization (the Mirror)
When to use: when you are speaking to someone who still believes the Wall Street Journal is a newspaper and not a protection service for the rent-accruing class
Let us be direct. The “cycle of big government” Megan Jacobson claims to diagnose is, in fact, the operating manual of the people who sign her paycheck. The Journal’s editorial page is the most reliable institutional voice for the proposition that government exists to subsidize capital and discipline labor. Its authors have never met a tax break for asset-holders they didn’t champion, and they have never met a refundable credit for working people they didn’t call a “distortion.”
So when Jacobson writes — and the editorial board publishes — “This is what happens when the government thinks it knows better than you how to spend your money,” you must substitute every “you” in that sentence with “a diversified real-estate portfolio.” The government does not know better than Blackstone how to spend its money; that is the official position of the editorial page. But the government does not know better than a home health aide whether she can afford a vet bill for the dog that keeps her daughter from having panic attacks? On that they are suddenly communists, insisting the state should not meddle.
The piece uses a technique logicians call the strawman: the pet credit is not a substitute for the child credit, and no legislator has argued otherwise; the comparison is invented so that Jacobson can posture as the defender of children while she cuts the ground from under every policy that might actually feed them. She follows it with a motte-and-bailey: the strong claim — that regulation is the root cause of unaffordability — retreats, when you push on it, to the weak claim that “government can’t fix everything,” only to re-emerge in the final paragraph as a demand for deregulation. This is not analysis; it is advocacy for a donor class that needs a patina of intellectual respectability.
The mirror: the Journal’s editorial page has spent the last five years arguing that state child-care subsidies “disrupt the market,” that rent stabilization is “Soviet,” and that taxing the unrealized gains of billionaires is “confiscation.” Now it discovers the moral urgency of keeping a family together with their pet. If they meant a word of it, they would be on the front page of every newspaper demanding the repeal of the carried-interest loophole, the restoration of the state and local tax deduction for working families, and the breakup of the real-estate trusts that are holding New York’s housing stock hostage. [Receipts: ITEP, 2024; Citizens Budget Commission, 2023] They are not on the front page of any newspaper for those causes. They have spent their institutional credibility defending the very concentrations of wealth that make a vet bill an emergency. The family that surrenders its dog is not a victim of government; it is a victim of the asset-class warfare the Journal has spent a century legitimizing. The editorial board is the ventriloquist; the politician they quote is the dummy. Cut the strings, and what you hear is the sound of a rent check being cashed.
DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire
When to use: against someone who is so deep inside the Wall Street Journal ecosystem that they can no longer distinguish between a news report and a real-estate prospectus
Come, gather round, and behold the magnificent spectacle of Dow Jones & Company, Incorporated, that august temple of free-market inquiry, discovering — mark the date, 2026, the Year of Our Lord — that it has a heart. A heart that beats, it would now have you know, for Mercy the mutt, for the caged beagle, for the surrendered tabby. Who knew? For a century this institution has argued that the only legitimate affection in a free society is the love between a shareholder and a dividend. But today the veil is rent, and we find the editorial board, moist-eyed, at the killing-floor door, wondering how it all came to this.
Look upon their works. Their energy-page editorials celebrated every regulatory rollback that let Con Edison charge you 70 percent more than the national average while it piped royalties to institutional investors. Their real-estate page cheered the Blackstone buy-up of entire neighborhoods, calling it “market fluidity” even as it turned rental housing into the financial equivalent of a pump-and-dump scheme. Their tax page spent the past two decades howling that the rich should keep every penny because they are “job creators” — until the jobs were dog-walking for the under-rich, and suddenly the moral arithmetic shifted.
Now they present you with the pet-credit bill, a piece of legislation so miniscule it would cost New York about one-tenth of one percent of the tax expenditures they demand for commercial landlords every year, and they call it “the classic cycle of big government.” [Receipts: Citizens Budget Commission, 2023] The only thing classic about this cycle is the Journal’s own choreography: Step One, pay the piper to write the melody that deregulation and tax cuts will produce abundance. Step Two, when the abundance arrives at the top and the misery at the bottom, blame the misery on government spending. Step Three, propose as the cure the same deregulation and tax cuts that produced the misery in Step Two. Step Four, collect your Pulitzer nomination for “courage in the defense of the taxpayer.” The cycle is not a cycle; it is a hamster wheel designed by the hamster’s food-dispenser salesman.
And then, the editorial writer’s pièce de résistance: she confides that the child tax credit “drops, when a child turns 4, to about what you would get for Fido.” Reader, the calculation is accurate: $500 for a child, $900 for two pets. Notice what is absent. A child, once she turns five, requires food, shelter, clothing, and schooling, all of which the state partially funds through entirely separate appropriations that total, per child, thousands of dollars a year. A golden retriever requires kibble. The pet credit is not a replacement for the child credit; it is a recognition that the state already carries the child through twelve years of public education, free breakfast and lunch, and Medicaid. But the editorial writer pretends the comparison is apples to apples, because the whole point of the editorial is to convince you that the government is more generous to animals than to your children — a claim that would be true only if you raised your children in a kennel and fed them Alpo.
The capper: “It is possible to live without one.” Yes. It is also possible to live without a Wall Street Journal subscription, and yet the nation’s dentists persist in filling their waiting rooms with it. It is possible to live without a lot of things — a warm home, a decent school, a functioning democracy — and the editorial page has been in the business of making those things optional for the many and mandatory for the few since before the ink was dry on the Fourteenth Amendment. The pet credit is not the crisis. The crisis is that the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country operates as a full-service propaganda arm for a class of rentiers who would rather see a million dogs dead than see a single dollar of their property-tax abatement redirected to the people who walk those dogs.
We do not blame the families who surrender their pets. We blame the editorial board that writes the surrender papers and then, in the same breath, argues that the landlord who evicted them should pay less in taxes. That board has a face, and the face is a real-estate prospectus, and on the cover, in embossed gold letters, are the words: “You Can Live Without One.”
DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment
When to use: when you are talking to a reader who knows the Bible better than the financial pages, and you need the canon itself to speak against the editorial board that claims to defend the taxpayer
The prophet Amos walked through the market-stalls of Bethel and saw a people who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals — they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted.” The prophet was not talking about the price of sandals. He was talking about the moral architecture of a society in which the instruments of exchange become instruments of extraction, and the extraction becomes so routine that the extractors no longer notice the dust on their ledgers.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page is the Amos-grade target of our moment. It has sold the weary home health aide for silver: her wages are below the cost of living because the editorial page spent forty years arguing against minimum-wage increases. It has sold the veteran with PTSD for a pair of sandals: the Veterans Affairs housing vouchers it derides as “dependency” are the only thing keeping some of them off the street, while the editorial page insists that private charity should fill the gap, and the private charity — funded by the diesel-fumes of the same commodity speculators the editorial page lionizes — is a soup kitchen that runs out of soup before the line is half served.
Now the newspaper discovers the “heartbreaking” plight of the surrendered pet. The prophet Jeremiah saw this maneuver three thousand years ago: “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush.” The Journal has the unblushing face the prophet named. It writes about the surrendered beagle with the same hand it used to sign the editorial that called rent stabilization “a cancer,” and it does not feel the category error. It cannot blush. The face is incapable of the physiological response that signals moral recognition.
The editorial board is drunk with the blood of the saints — and the saints, in this economy, include the children who go hungry because their mother’s Section 8 voucher was cut, the elderly woman who froze in her apartment because the utility deregulation they demanded made a heating bill a luxury, the father who surrendered the family dog because the landlord the Journal’s tax policy enriched raised the rent again. The seer of Patmos wrote of a golden cup full of abominations; the Journal holds that cup, and the liquid inside is the ink-black profit of the commercial real-estate trusts, and they offer it to every politician who will repeat their talking point about “big government” while the shelter’s incinerator burns.
The Lord does not hear the prayers of those whose hands are full of blood. The hand that types the editorial is the hand that signed the lease. The hand that types the editorial is the hand that lobbied against the earned income tax credit expansion. The hand that types the editorial is the hand that argued, in the pages of the same newspaper, that a man who loses his job should have “skin in the game” before he gets unemployment insurance. And yet the same hand now strokes the head of Mercy the mutt and asks you to believe it cares about the animals.
We are the ones who are called to be witnesses. We testify that the Journal’s God is not the Lord of the Sermon on the Mount but Moloch, the god of the ledger-book, who demands the sacrifice of the poor to feed the furnaces of the rent-accruing class. The cup of trembling is being poured, and the editorial board will drink it. We do not rejoice in that. We say only: the record is kept, and the record is damning. Amos said, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The Journal damns the stream and then cries crocodile tears over the thirsty dog. The dog is innocent. The editorial board is not.
DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth
When to use: when the target is so deeply committed to the lie that only the full-throated, expletive-loaded fury of the moral witness can break the spell, and you are speaking to those who need catharsis
I want you to understand what the Wall Street Journal editorial page actually is, right now, in 2026. It is a money-laundering operation for ideas. It takes the raw, stinking greed of the American rentier class, runs it through a series of linguistic shell companies — “fiscal responsibility,” “market forces,” “personal choice” — and spits out a product that smells like journalism but is, in fact, a call to financial arms against anyone who has less than eight figures in assets. The pet-credit editorial is the purest, most undiluted form of that operation, and it is, objectively, a fucking masterpiece of dissemblance.
This is the logic: New York landlords — some of whom pull down more in annual tax-exempt rental income than the entire GDP of a small Pacific island nation — have spent decades buying politicians. Those politicians wrote a tax code that treats a single-family rental-empire as if it were a small business and a billion-dollar private-equity windfall as if it were a capital gain. That tax code, combined with zoning laws written by the same landlords’ hand-picked lobbyists, produced a housing market that is, for anyone who doesn’t own already, a goddamn hostage situation. Then, when the legislature proposes to give a few hundred bucks back to people whose wages have been stolen by rent, the editorial page calls it “the classic cycle of big government.”
The cycle is not big government. The cycle is this: the editorial page’s owners extract, the editorial page editorializes to protect the extraction, the extraction intensifies, more people are crushed, the editorial page writes another editorial, and somewhere in the middle of the night a pit bull mix named Otis is put down because his human couldn’t afford a fucking rabies shot. That is the cycle, and the Wall Street Journal is the oil in the machine.
They point to rent control and say “see, government is the problem.” Rent control is not the problem. The problem is that in a city where the average one-bedroom costs $3,600 a month, the same landlords who oppose rent control also oppose every single public-housing bond, every single inclusionary-zoning ordinance, every single tax on empty luxury units, and every single proposal to fund legal services for tenants facing eviction. They want the whole field to themselves, and then when people can’t afford the field, they blame the government for not subsidizing the field. It’s a fucking con, and it’s been running for so long that the marks have forgotten there ever was a game.
The editorial writer tells you, in the voice of a woman who is just so concerned about the poor, that it’s “possible to live without” a dog. You know what else it’s possible to live without? An economic press. We could live without a newspaper whose editorial page has, in my living memory, never met a tax break for the top 1 percent it didn’t print, never met a labor union it didn’t try to drown in a bathtub, never met a social spending program it didn’t call “waste,” and never, not once, taken responsibility for the outcome of the policies it pimped. The chicken is home to roost. The roost is a shelter full of dead dogs, and the editorial board is sitting in a midtown high-rise, polishing its Pulitzer, wondering why the peasants are so tired.
Here is the truth, in language even a fucking Dow Jones subscriber can understand: the taxpayer’s kitty is not a pet credit; the taxpayer’s kitty is the $1.4 trillion in tax expenditures the U.S. government pays out every goddamn year — the top ten alone exceeding that figure in FY 2026, per the Joint Committee on Taxation — and the editorial board has defended the ones that flow upward with the same breath it uses to condemn the ones that flow down. The pet credit is a rounding error on a rounding error. The editorial board does not oppose government spending; it opposes government spending that does not flow to its owners’ asset statements. When the state bails out a failing bank, they call it “stabilization.” When the state credits a dog owner forty-five bucks a month, they call it “big government run amok.” The only difference is who signs the check. [Receipts: ITEP, 2024; Citizens Budget Commission, 2023]
So you want to talk about the family that surrenders its dog? Fine. The Journal’s editorial-staffer writes, “As heartbreaking as it is to give up your dog, it is possible to live without one.” Here is my response, and I will be as clear as the fourth of July: it is possible to live without a Wall Street Journal editorial page, and displaced New Yorkers have been doing it for years by getting their financial news from an astrology app because the Journal’s money page was too busy telling them that avocados were the reason they couldn’t afford a house. It is possible to live without the editorial page’s daily dose of market-fundamentalist horseshit — the same horseshit that told us deregulation would bring energy costs down, when in fact it turned Consolidated Edison into a legalized cartel that prices heat like a fucking Afghani warlord prices grain. It is possible to live without the weekly insistence that the only moral use of a tax refund is to give it to a hedge-fund manager, because he’s the “innovator” and the rest of us are just consumers of a service called “staying alive.” It is possible to live without the constant, grinding, soul-deadening propaganda that the government is the enemy and the landlord is the hero, when any half-conscious person can see that the government is the only thing standing between the landlord and a return to the tenement conditions that gave us the Tenement House Act of 1901.
The editorial page is not a friend of the taxpayer. It is a pimp for the landowning class, and the taxpayer is the trick. The paper’s logo is a diamond; the diamond is the same shape as the eye of Moloch, and just as pitiless, just as hungry, just as indifferent to the pile of small, furry bodies at the door of the shelter. They want you to believe the pet credit is a scandal. The real scandal is that the editorial board still exists, still types, still prints, and still has the goddamned gall to act surprised when the dogs start dying. We will keep our dogs, and we will keep our humanity, and we will keep our righteous fury, and we will publish it in a font they can read from their midtown corner office: fuck the Wall Street Journal editorial page — and every last one of its blood-money rationalizations.
The Deeper Breakdown
Who benefits when the Wall Street Journal tells you a $450 pet-care reimbursement is the “classic cycle of big government” — and who pays the real price?
Follow the money. In February 2026, New Yorkers paid residential electricity rates 70% above the national average — 29.99 cents per kilowatt-hour against a U.S. average below 18 cents. That premium isn’t a natural disaster. It’s the product of a utility market in which Consolidated Edison and its peers enjoy near-monopoly distribution territories while the Journal’s editorial page has, for decades, opposed public power alternatives, fought renewable portfolio standards that would introduce competition, and defended the rate structures that guarantee investor returns before a single dollar goes to maintenance. When Jacobson writes that “energy costs 70% above the U.S. average” are part of the government burden crushing families, she omits that her own newspaper helped build the regulatory architecture that produces those bills. The high cost is a feature of a system the editorial page endorsed — not an accident it now laments.
The housing side tells the same story in sharper relief. Jacobson pins New York’s shelter crisis on rent control, citing the claim that 50,000 units sit empty because regulation “made it financially impractical for owners to rent them out.” The real numbers, from the NYU Furman Center’s comprehensive annual housing survey, show that fewer than 5% of rent-stabilized units are vacant at any time, and most vacancies are for repairs — not the landlord strike the editorial implies. Meanwhile, New York City alone grants well over a billion dollars a year in property-tax abatements, exemptions, and deferrals to commercial and residential developers — subsidies the Journal’s tax editorialists call “incentives” when they flow to real-estate portfolios and “distortions” when they flow to a home health aide’s vet bill. The Citizens Budget Commission of New York has documented tax expenditures flowing to developers that dwarf the projected cost of the pet credit by orders of magnitude.
The cui-bono finding is not subtle. The pet credit, at $900 maximum per household, would cost New York a fraction of a percent of what the state forgoes annually in tax expenditures for commercial landlords and fossil-fuel utilities. The editorial does not mention those subsidies because mentioning them would collapse the frame. The frame requires you to believe government spending is the problem — but the editorial page’s actual position, applied consistently across every opinion it has published for decades, is that government spending is only a problem when ordinary people receive it. When asset-holders receive it — through carried interest, through property-tax abatements, through utility rate guarantees — the same page calls it sound policy. The pet credit is not a scandal. The scandal is a newspaper of record laundering the preferences of the rent-accruing class as economic wisdom while the shelters fill up.
The family surrendering its dog is not a victim of big government. It is a victim of the upward redistribution the Journal has spent a century calling freedom. The receipts are in the tax expenditure reports, the utility rate filings, and the shelter intake logs — and none of them point where the editorial says they point.