Posted on 11/24/2009 5:13:32 AM PST by shortstop
Let it shut down.
The state of New York.
Let it run out of money, let the lights go out, let the IOUs roll.
Sometimes to fix it, you’ve got to break it. And this is one of those times. New York needs tough love. In these waters, the best thing is to put the ship on the rocks and wade to shore.
With a budget gap of $3.2 billion, an incompetent for a governor and a gaggle of moral crooks in the legislature, it’s time to take Grama off life support.
Just let it shut down.
Gov. David Paterson said the state needs a budget deal in the next couple of weeks or it will literally run out of money. Special-interest groups immediately began running ads to protect their sacred cows. Legislators postured, not calling for fiscal responsibility, but promising to safeguard health care or education or some other sacred money pit. The third week of negotiations is underway.
With no signs of hope.
And that’s good.
Because it shouldn’t surprise anyone that New York is out of money. It has operated at a deficit for more than a generation. Successive governors and legislatures have found ever-more creative ways to doctor the books and mortgage the future. To make things worse, New York is a state where the entire political order is built on trying to suck money out of the public trough.
But the trough is dry.
And it’s time to face that reality.
And shutting down the state government is the first step in that process. It’s time not to save New York’s government, but to gut it. To reach inside and pull out the fat and waste and throw them on the ground. Everybody needs a big dose of reality and it might as well start now.Because this lead balloon won’t fly any longer.
New York has: The highest taxes; the most government employees per capita; the highest-paid government employees in the nation; the highest welfare benefits; the highest percentage of welfare recipients; the highest education spending in the nation; the most onerous government regulation of business in the nation.
And people wonder why the budget is in the red.
New York has made an art out of taxing and borrowing to feed a numberless multitude of government employees and welfare recipients. The state’s motto – once “Excelsior” for “ever upward” – should be changed to “Entitlement.” Freeway rest stops are shut down for lack of money, but Cadillac retirement packages continue to roll out for gold bricks who game the system to pad their lifelong checks. Working people are clobbered with ever-higher taxes while the welfare classes have proliferating programs and ever more ways to cheat them.
This fiscal year’s budget – forged in the midst of an historic recession – featured an increase in New York state spending of 9 percent. Welfare recipients were given a raise and promised raises in each of the next two years.
Why?
Because the governor needs the welfare vote come election day, and because the legislators get to keep being legislators by doling out ever-larger servings of other people’s money. So the realities of New York’s finances were pushed off for another day, as they have for years on end.
And that leaves us $3.2 billion in the hole. And the next several years seem to be similarly out of balance. And like the drunken sailor that it is, New York frittered away the prosperous years by, amazingly, glutting itself on record-setting tax receipts and still running up a deficit. When it should have been paying down debt, New York was acquiring more debt.
That’s why the hard times have been so ruinous. With its industry long since taxed and regulated out of state, and agriculture laboring under onerous environmental regulations, and commerce encumbered by high taxes and ridiculous labor laws, New York’s only ace in the hole was Wall Street. As long as it could impose huge taxes on its huge profits and bonuses, life was OK. But those have gone, and the bottom has fallen out of the state’s budget.
So it’s time to let it crash.
It’s time to let the workers’ checks bounce, and to tell the welfare recipients that there’s no more cash on their “benefits card.” It’s time for the whole thing to go down in flames.
It’s time for New York to be shown as the laughingstock it is. It’s time for the state to go bankrupt and the grownups to take over.
Because one more last-minute, back-room deal is not what we need. We cannot tolerate irresponsibility being rewarded again. We cannot have one of our once-great states continue to humiliate itself and destroy its future.
It’s time to let this come to a head. It’s time to let the pieces fall where they may.
It’s time to shut it down.
Let New York run out of money.
Seems to me New York is a microcosm of what we will soon be facing in the US of A. The parallel is spooky.
California too...their gap is way bigger, I believe.
http://www.sacbee.com/budget/story/2336962.html
Sadly, if NY doesn’t get its act together, it will soon see a return to David Dinkins’ style “prosperity”. About the only thing keeping the city going is the tourists, who love the restaurants and entertainment in what is a relatively safe and clean city since Giuliani cleaned things up. If the fiscal crisis results in a drop in police vigilance or a deterioration of public works, the tourists will stay away and the city will die.
Its a good thing those terror trials will only cost them 75 million...what a deal!
There are going to be RECORD bonuses paid this year on wall street thanks to taxpayer bailouts...
Badda Bing pnh102 that was the first thing to come to my mind. But in this case it will be the governor telling the city to drop dead.
ditto Colly-fornya.
This is already occurring on the National level.
Bring in the terrorists and see how many tourists take their vacations elsewhere.
I want it to happen here in Michigan. There’s no point in doing business here because if you make a buck, they want 2 bucks. If you make two bucks, they want 3 more. Its never going to end without cutting them off entirely.
Anything less than cold turkey will fail.
You beat me by two years...
What teachers are paid is ridiculous. Increase the class size and letter 1/8th of the teachers find something else to do.
Our city teachers are the highest paid around....and only 45% of the kids graduate. I'd guess the next 20% are borderline...
If you insist on taxing productivity and rewarding sloth, if you base your political campaigns on buying votes through entitlements, if you do not respect life, liberty, or property rights, then you can live in the world that results.
And if that world is a painful, bloody mess, then perhaps the wisdom of our Founding Fathers will become more plain to you.
Then do likewise with Philadelphia...and so forth.
I am thinking of suing you for defamation of character. I was one “the drunken sailor”, sir, and I point out to you that “WE SPENT ONLY OUR OWN MONEY”. Then we quit and went back to the ship.
I demand, for all of us, an apology.
I was, and some still are, “drunken sailors”, NOT political hacks. There, I said it.
On the other hand it isn’t entirely our own fault. Federal interference hasn’t exactly helped. The feds sowed the seeds of the EPA, NEA, FDA, etc and we provided the fertile ground.
A return to state sovereignty would go a long way toward correcting the problem but first we have to accept the fact that our sovereignty wasn’t taken, it was sold.
What is their pay and what are your class sizes? Here, teachers are paid about $40k and there's about 20 kids per class. Way back when I was in school the normal class had about 35 kids. I think the magic number was 42 before they would have to divide it and make two classes. Back in the day, we also didn't have so many assistants for teachers and principals and everything else you could think of. And assistants for the assistants.
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