Governor Andrew Cuomo has seemingly done the impossible. It appears he has outmaneuvered Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver in negotiating the NYS budget. At $132.5 billion, it is $4 billion less than last year’s $136.5 billion spending spree. For 20 years now, Silver has successfully driven up state spending above what New Yorkers could afford or should have been paying.
With air support from his backers in the powerful Teachers and Healthcare Workers applying public pressure against even the most common sense spending cuts, we have seen the budget increase by twice the rate of inflation since 1994, when the budget was a modest $61.9 billion.
The constant increase in taxes at every level to pay for this reckless spending has led to NY being called the Vampire State instead of the Empire State. So has Cuomo finally stopped the bloodsucking of the weary NY taxpayer and put us on the road to recovery?
As they say, the devil is in the details, and the details for Cuomo are mixed.
Cuomo successfully resisted Silver’s push to extend the millionaires tax surcharge, which actually took effect for people making around $250,000. However, Cuomo failed to get a medical malpractice awards reform measure passed, the one substantial item proposed by his Medicaid reform commission.
Silver, who is “of counsel” to the litigation firm Weitz & Luxenberg, made sure that nothing would affect the income of his other major funding source, the trial lawyers.
He also gets an incomplete on his other major objectives, a cap on local property taxes and mandate relief. His mandate commission offered nothing on reform of public pensions or collective bargaining, leaving the government employees unions with the upper hand over taxpayers in negotiations.
Additionally they failed to propose the elimination of any mandates, ignoring their mandate and focusing instead on identifying minor budget cuts instead of institutional reforms for cities and localities.
Cuomo’s move to stock these commissions with representatives from the big government employee unions may have helped ease the way for this budget. Instead of mounting their typical TV campaign attacking the governor’s efforts to rein in spending, they were sidelined trying to find clever ways to pass the buck. But their failure to produce any substantial reforms could hurt Cuomo in the long run.
This will be Cuomo’s true test. If he rejects the pathetic offerings of these commissions, goes over their heads and writes his own reform plans, he will achieve the transformational aspect of his agenda he has been touting. If he caves to the unions, and uses these commission reports as cover, it will undercut any real reform and will possibly serve as the epitaph to his governorship.
Robert Hornak is a Queens-based political consultant, blogger, and an active member of the Queens Republican Party.
