By DANIEL MAHALA,
Shame on the Advance. You did not fact-check or math-check your editorial of Dec. 14 and added to the shock wave that reverberated through Island families that have children in private schools.
You start with correct figures for the MTA bailout tax: .034 cents on every dollar earned (or 3.4 cents per hundred dollars). But you lost it after that. Those figures equate to a tax increase of .034 percent which is reached by using the multiplier .00034.
Whoever calculated the $507 increase per student per year for Catholic schools on Staten Island had the decimal in the wrong place. (I don’t have the payroll figure to calculate the exact amount.) But the real number is hardly a figure that would draw 1,000 protesters or start a letter writing campaign.
I think you owe these people and other readers of your paper an apology.