The New York Times this morning has a front-page story on the difficulty of balancing New York State’s budget, which is gushing red ink. The governor, David Paterson, called the legislature into session this week and delivered an address to both houses, asking — begging, really — for serious budget cuts to cover a $3 billion deficit in this year’s budget and far larger deficits in future years.
Good luck with that, governor. As the Times explains:
Gov. David A. Paterson is imploring the Legislature to finally reckon with the state’s ugly financial reality.
But first the governor must reckon with the likes of Senator Carl Kruger.
Mr. Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has amassed a campaign war chest of $2.1 million, in part because of generous contributions from his labor union allies.
Despite a deficit of more than $3 billion, Mr. Kruger has threatened to block any significant cuts to health care and education, the biggest spending areas in the budget. He has presented his own budget plan, which has startled even Albany veterans for its reliance on one-time maneuvers and financial gimmickry.
Last week, the state’s most powerful union, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, had a rally in Albany, with 2,000 people screaming for no cuts. The SEIU and other public-service unions don’t hesitate to launch aggressive TV-advertising campaigns against politicians who do not toe the union line, while donating generously to the campaign war chests of those who do, such as Senator Kruger. The taxpayers have no means to push back, since the legislature is thoroughly gerrymandered. As a result, politicians take the path of least resistance: like Kruger, they prefer to use creative accounting to get around the state constitution’s requirement that the expense budget be balanced, rather than face fiscal reality. This, of course, simply makes the problem worse in the future, as more and more of today’s budget is funded with tomorrow’s money.
The Times has finally woken up to the fact that gerrymandering is an affront to the very principle of democratic government. And unless it and the rest of the New York media world finally acknowledge that allowing politicians to keep the state’s books as they please guarantees gimmickry instead of hard choices, disaster is inevitable. Like every corporation in the country, governments need the discipline that comes from having to adhere to rigorous accounting principles, and relying on independent accountants to ensure that they do.
Two observations:
According to the New York Times
1) the meeting in question was scheduled for June 6 not 27 and
2) it was cancelled due to a dispute, not the threat
I realize that this doesn’t change the substance of what your argument, but which details are correct? Or have they been reported differently in different media?
Since it didn’t come out here’s the URL for the NYT article cited above.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/world/middleeast/22mideast.html?ref=world
Hi soccer dad,
The news reports I read on the subject stated the meeting date as June 26th. But I just reviewed a bunch more stories, and the reported dates that the meeting was supposed to take place on are all over the place — June 6th, June 26th, August 11th, etc. And Haaretz reported the following on Oct. 22nd:
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/915680.html
“These are the facts that Haaretz has discovered: On June 25 or 26, about six weeks prior to Olmert’s scheduled visit to Jericho, the Shin Bet informed the PA that an attack was being planned, but the nature of the attack was still uncertain. On June 28, the three men were arrested. Olmert visited Jericho on August 6, while they were still in custody.”
So, to make a long story short, you’re right — I probably got the dates wrong. But I’m also not sure what the correct dates might be, as everyone’s reporting something different. Anyway, thanks for bringing this to my attention. As far as the reason for the cancellation, I was going by what an Israeli official told me.
Thanks for the clarification. I also noticed that there were a lot of conflicting details, so thanks for laying them all out, too.