I must say that I've had pretty high hopes for NYS Governor David Paterson. It started with his first news conference after Eliot Spitzer resigned. When asked by a reporter if he had ever patronized a prostitute he replied: "Only the lobbyists".
I was further favorably impressed by his memo in May to NY state agencies ordering them to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
But his proposals today in response to pending budget shortfalls are both disappointing and sort-sighted.
The State of New York gets a substantial amount of it's tax revenue from Wall Street. The economic meltdown will undoubtedly result in a huge loss for the state.
"The state could lose as much as $3.5 billion in tax revenues by March 2010 because of the meltdown on Wall Street, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said Monday."
...
"Even before the latest spasm of bad news for bank and investment firms, Paterson was predicting a $24 billion shortfall in the state budget over the next three years."
source
So today, Paterson unveiled his proposals on how to deal with the estimated $2 billion dollar effort to balance the state's budget.
Among his proposals are an almost $1.2 billion cut to education and health care, pay cuts and a lag-payroll confiscation for state workers, and major increases in tuition to state colleges.
(note: For those who aren't familiar with what a"lag-payroll" is, it's basically having the state take one week's pay from each of it's union employees and holding on to it until the employee leaves state service. I worked for the NYS Education Dept. back in the early 1980's when they did this. It amounts to taking one week of a worker's annual wage in order to cover state budget losses.)
Here's what Paterson didn't do.
For months, progressives (and even State Assembly leader Sliver) have been pushing Paterson to support a tax on the wealthiest New Yorkers as a way of sharing the pain. Paterson has been resistant to the idea. The so-called "Millionaires Tax" could raise as much as $1.6 billion the first year. And even though Bloomberg and Trump direly warn that such a tax would result in a massive exodus of millionaires from the state, evidence shows that when neighboring New Jersey did the same thing a few years ago, it resulted in no such thing.
So, instead of balancing the state budget on the backs of it's workers, cutting healthcare, slashing education funds, and making a college education more difficult for many families to obtain, Paterson could have made the fat cats who contributed to this mess help pay to clean it up. But he didn't.
Very disappointing.