NY State Budget is Dead on Arrival

It’s finally arrived! Not the fully completed New York State budget, heaven forbid, but State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s assessment of the $134.4 billion budgetary behemoth. New York’s top accountant is making official what we taxpayers already knew; that this budget is a testimony to incompetent leadership and cowardly, reelection-driven legislators.

This is a budget that increases spending by $5.4 billion, twice the rate of inflation at 4.2 percent. They expect Washington to give back the $1.1 billion in Medicaid aid they had taken away from us for their own budgetary constraints. This is how our legislators expect to plug the $9.2 billion budget gap. Add in unrealistic expectations for increased state income. Now pile on one time savings gimmicks of over $14 billion instead of truly cutting costs anywhere within the State government.

This budget expects to see $500 million in savings from concessions by the public employee unions in pension relief, overtime, and hiring practices. Who knows, since the unions have not yet agreed to one dollar worth of concessions. And let’s not forget that the legislators left for vacation without voting on a bill to raise $1 billion in new taxes for us all.

I think you get the picture. We the citizens of New York State are witnessing the most incompetent, cowardly, sorry excuses for lawmakers in our long history. It is impossible to expect New York to become a place that people will want to live in and that businesses will want to move to without a complete purge of every incumbent occupying a seat in the current legislature. It is humiliating that we have allowed these people to squander our hard earned tax dollars. How dare they spend money they knew we didn’t have. We’re paying over $8 in taxpayer money for every dollar put in by a public employee’s union worker. I propose a matching pension fund contribution with a yearly ceiling.

The legislators did not put a property tax increase limit in the budget. I propose a property tax freeze. I also propose that we rid ourselves of all these people who have breached the public trust by firing them all on November 3rd. They have failed us by destroying our wonderful state by making it a cruel burden to choose to live here. I love New York and will fight to save it from going the way of Greece. It will take 230 new Citizen Legislators, dedicated to cutting the size of government and government spending, dedicated to making New York a magnet for new businesses, and dedicated to their own term limits, to begin turning New York back into a place we all are proud to live in.

Steve Katz is a veterinarian running for the NY 99th Assembly seat. He has enough signatures to force a Republican primary and is the endorsed candidate of the Independence party. His website for more information iskatz4ny. com.