When Governor Andrew Cuomo took office in January he preached one message: unnecessary spending.
Despite the astronomical tax hikes of recent years, New York State is facing bankruptcy, and Cuomo seeks to reverse the damage done by eliminating spending on education and health care that New Yorkers simply cannot sustain.
Thoughtless, double-digit increases in spending on education and Medicaid annually have primarily contributed to the state’s deficit, said Cuomo, according to crainsnewyork.com. He recognizes, unlike his predecessors, that this type of spending cannot be condoned given the current economic climate, and he seeks to end it by cutting 2.85 billion dollars of the Medicaid and education budgets this year.
Naturally, these substantial cuts to the state budget have given rise to opposition among public unions, but Cuomo has urged lawmakers to stand firm in resistance to special interest groups who preach not for the well-being of most New Yorkers, but for their own salaries and benefits.
Of the 90% increase to home health care programs since 2003, 52% of the money expended has gone to administrative costs. In the field of education, Cuomo says 600 million dollars can be saved by reducing teachers’ health benefits to that of the average state worker, according to crainsnewyork.com. The cuts to be made are not attacks on New York’s children or the sick; they are attacks on the types of spending which are irresponsible and are not vital to the functionality of the state economy.
The governor cited public pensions as a source of unsustainable and unwise spending which is driving up taxes for all New Yorkers. He has proposed a new pension plan which will raise the retirement age to sixty-five and require employees to pay twice as much towards their pension plans. These reforms should begin to make up for the twenty increases made to the taxpayer’s contribution to public pensions since 2001, according to CBS.
The president of the New York State Public Employees Federation, Kenneth Brynien, voiced his incredulity regarding the cuts Cuomo is making to the state budget on behalf of New York’s public workers.
Brynien described the pension cuts as “draconian cuts that would inflict permanent damage to middle class workers, for what is a transient problem,” according to the New York Times.
Likewise, Danny Donohue, president of the Civil Service Employees Association, the largest union of state workers in New York, said, “Congratulations to Governor Cuomo for another grandstand play for the attention of his millionaire friends at the expense of the real working people of New York,” in a recent issue of the Times.
The cuts Governor Cuomo has proposed, however, are hardly fit to the hyperbolic evaluation of draconian, and the problem they will help to fix is not transient. Economists from the left and the right sides of the political spectrum agree that New York State is in serious financial trouble, and if cuts are not made to parts of the budget which are perpetually increasing that financial trouble, the unfortunate economic situation we’re in will only worsen.
The cuts are also not a ploy to gain political praise from Mr. Cuomo’s “millionaire friends.” The fiscal policy changes will improve the economic situation for New Yorkers across the economic spectrum, by decreasing the tax burden and making living in New York more affordable.
For over a decade out-of-touch gubernatorial administrations in New York have thoughtlessly driven up state taxes as a method of sustaining reckless spending, but with the present focus on economic frugality statewide, the time has come to turn this political current. In taking these bold steps for economic recovery, Governor Cuomo has already begun to represent himself as an advocate for the average New Yorker who puts the approval of lobbyists and other politicians below that of his constituents on his list of priorities, and if state legislators see his objectives through, we can be sure that the Empire State will be much closer to being the center of economic prosperity for which it was once known.