It will end when we clean house in Albany.
Posted on 08/16/2004 7:33:44 AM PDT by The Mayor
| New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com |
| Albany's budgetary fairy tales
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno succeeded primarily in delaying hard, unavoidable choices when their members approved - unread and unexplained - bills that authorized $101.3 billion in spending. Then, the bunch collected the paychecks that have been withheld since they failed to meet the April 1 budget deadline and dumped the mess in Gov. Pataki's lap. Pataki is threatening vetoes, accusing Silver and Bruno of larding on spending and refusing to cut costs. By his lights, the Legislature's fiscal plan is likely out of balance and will boost already considerable deficits in coming years. He's probably right, but the governor's posture as the guarantor of fiscal probity is laughable. He failed to lead Silver and Bruno to the fiscal restraint that New York desperately needs, and he has presided over spending that has surged far faster than the rate of inflation. Over the past four budgets, state outlays grew at an average annual rate of 7.5%, from $73.3 billion to $95.5 billion. Pataki would boost that an additional 4.5%, while the Legislature has gone all the way to approving a 6.1% hike. With inflation running at 2.5%, no wonder the state faces huge budget gaps and New Yorkers bear the nation's highest tax burden. Pataki's vetoes, if and when they come, will only nip at such profligacy. Cutting $50 million here and $50 million there will not cure Albany's addiction to lavish outlays on programs such as Medicaid and politically beneficial luxuries such as top-drawer pensions for public workers. They will do nothing, in other words, to bring New York taxing and spending into line with real-life economics. For the moment, pending Pataki's veto decisions, the Legislature's midnight-express action has given New York City and other localities a sense of where they stand. For the city, the solons approved Mayor Bloomberg's plan for $400 property tax rebates, allocated $300 million for the schools, passed a critical bond financing scheme and agreed to assume local costs for one Medicaid program. But at the same time, they grabbed $233 million from your pockets by extending the sales tax on purchases of clothing costing $110 or less. All this, depressingly, is par for the course, but 2004 is a different year. The courts will soon tell Pataki, Silver and Bruno how many more billions of dollars they must devote to the city's schools. The bill will be enormous, but the three officials have made no plans for paying it. Which is why the so-called budget is as fantastic as "The Lord of the Rings," and why Pataki's proposal was not much better. Drama queens Negotiations between City Hall and the police and firefighters unions have become heated. Union leaders are hinting at wildcat strikes during the Republican convention and hurling "we know where you live" taunts at the mayor and his staff. It all makes for lousy negotiations and good theater, most of which is being staged by labor bosses for the benefit of the only audience that counts for them. They've got to appear tough for their members or they're out of their cushy jobs. Mayor Bloomberg is trying to get cops and firefighters to follow the pattern set by his pact with District Council 37, the largest municipal labor union. Those workers will get a $1,000 signing bonus, 5% raises over three years and bigger increases tied to gains in productivity. Patrolmen's Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch and Uniformed Firefighters Association head Stephen Cassidy call those numbers insulting. What they rarely say is that Bloomberg has given the cops and firefighters the opportunity for raises of as much as 9.18% and offered a half-dozen ways to get the money. Each entails productivity savings that would make pay hikes of that magnitude affordable for a city whose budget is held together by safety pins. The PBA has helpfully posted Bloomberg's offers on its Web site (www.nycpba.org), but Lynch and Cassidy haven't countered with their own proposals. They'd rather rail against Bloomberg, go to arbitration and blame the arbitrator if they lose. In other words, they're generating a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. You can e-mail the Daily News editors at voicers@edit.nydailynews.com. Please include your full name, address and phone number. The Daily News reserves the right to edit letters. The shorter the letter, the better the chance it will be used. |
Ping!
Ping!
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/letters/18648.htm
ALBANY BUDGET MESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/nyregion/10albany.html
Albany Budget Near, but Pataki's Intentions Are Unclear
The politics of NY is just crazy. I was listening to Brian Whitman about Staten Island politics, and it's a wonder how NY stays afloat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/nyregion/16empire.html
Albany Puts Off Repairing a Jobs-Creation Program
It's a sinking ship, with silver, bruno and pataki at the helm....
Who's gonna be the next governor?
Schumer, Spitzer, Rudy?
How in God's name can we get rid of these idiots?
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-lipols0816,0,4779559.column?coll=ny-news-columnists
Suozzi gets his first Albany fix
http://www.syracuse.com/news/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/news-17/1092572230271891.xml
Empire Zones badly broken, but state extends tax breaks
I gotta go find a job!
I still say that it should be the new design for whatever real conservative party succeeds the insipid Rockerfeller Republicanism that we're enduring right now.
P.S. On your profile page, you have a quote from William McKinley, reported to be from his first inaugural address. I looked up the inaugural address---the quote does not appear in it. If McKinley said it, it wasn't at the inauguration.
Here are the other 3
Will do!
I got all those quotes from the Federalist.com They must have it wrong then.
BRUNO AND THE PERP
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/29026.htm
August 17, 2004 -- Let's see if we get this straight: Former state Sen. Guy Velella is doing time on Rikers Island, basically for criminal abuse of the public trust, and he's still cashing a public paycheck?
Yep.
As Post State Editor Fredric U. Dicker reported yesterday, Velella left office May 14 — just 135 days, or 37 percent, into the calendar year. He's now serving a 12-month stint at Rikers for soliciting bribes from contractors.
Senate Majority Leader Bruno made sure Velella got $21,000 of his yearly "lulu" — the special stipend for serving as deputy majority leader.
The jailed pol should have gotten only $10,175 for the 135 days. His $21,000 payment exceeded that by more than $10,000. Clearly it helps to have friends in high places.
And that's not the half of it.
Velella was also allowed to pocket a state pension of $80,000 a year.
But then, why shouldn't pols look out for each other?
It's only taxpayers' money, right? And pols couldn't care less about taxpayers.
Nor is Velella — Bruno's fellow Republican — the only state pol to be rewarded by his peers for bad behavior.
State Sen. Ada Smith, a Democrat from Queens, also broke the law — by resisting a police officer and speeding through a checkpoint — and yet will continue to get her $16,500 "leadership" lulu.
Sure, her party's leader in the Senate, David Paterson, harrumphed about the need for "proper decorum around here."
Smith, you see, had also been accused of making anti-gay statements and, a few years ago, of biting a cop as he tried to arrest her in Brooklyn.
This time, Paterson swiftly fired Smith as chairwoman of the Democratic conference, costing her the $16,500 perk.
Except for one thing: Paterson, at the same time, made her an assistant minority leader — enabling her to keep the lulu, not to mention her state car.
The Albany wink-and-nod, it seems, is bipartisan.
For well-connected pols, that is.
The taxpayers are on their own.
The Three Stooges is the BEST!!!
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