New York Times Asks NY Governor Cuomo Why Austerity When the State is Looking at an Ample Surplus!

Dear Commons Community,

As New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and the legislators finish up budget negotiations for next year, there appears to be a major gap in funding for New York City.  Hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts keep finding their way back into all of the Governors proposals. Some of his proposals look more like that of a right-wing Republican ideologue such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin.  His proposals to cut CUNY and/or Medicaid would be devastating.  The New York Times editorial today (see below) makes a plea for the Governor to remember his Democratic Party roots and stop punishing the City.  

NY Times Editorial (March 1, 2016)

“Negotiations in Albany over the New York State budget are hurtling toward an April 1 deadline with a cliffhanger question unanswered: How much damage will the budget do to New York City?

That is, how big a hole will Gov. Andrew Cuomo manage to blow in the city’s finances, by saddling it with hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs for Medicaid or the City University of New York, or through some other confiscatory tactics? How much harm will this inflict upon the poor, the sick and those striving to better themselves in college?

And a larger, more perplexing question: Why do any of this? Why impose an austerity budget that punishes the city when the state has ample budget surpluses?

As secretive negotiations continued on Wednesday night, in the usual Albany way, officials in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration were watching and waiting.

In theory, they had nothing to worry about, because the governor had given his word in January, shortly after his State of the State address, that the vast cuts to Medicaid and CUNY in his executive budget “won’t cost New York City a penny.” Which is hard to believe, since Mr. Cuomo has been insisting, in various and shifting ways, that the city will have to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in spending that the state seemed intent on shrugging off.

In Albany, no budget is done until it’s done, and it’s hard to predict where the deal-making ends up. But the starting point, the executive budget Mr. Cuomo released in January, was colossally bad for New York City. It cut $485 million in state funds for CUNY, based on the administration’s false insistence that the university’s administrative costs are “bloated.” (Independent analysis shows that the CUNY system spends less on administration than most of its peers.)

The budget also shifted to the city — and no other municipality in the state — some of the rising costs of Medicaid, reneging on an obligation the state had assumed in 2012. City officials estimate the state Medicaid cuts would cost city taxpayers $300 million in the 2017 fiscal year, rise to $1 billion a year in 2022, and keep climbing.

City officials were recently told that the CUNY cuts were off the table, but they are waiting for the final deal, and watching for signs of other budget punishment: One troubling proposal was for the state to help itself to $200 million in city sales taxes each year, for three years.

Democrats in the Assembly have been pushing back at the moving targets — like Mr. Cuomo’s destructive Medicaid plan, which morphed this week into a proposal for $250 million in statewide Medicaid “savings,” a dubious search for “efficiencies” that would hit hard in New York City, where most Medicaid patients are.

There is a strange urgency to Mr. Cuomo’s austerity drive. The cuts he has floated are of the magnitude usually seen in times of great distress, like the recession of 2008. One billion dollars is the size of the city’s general reserve, its cushion against bad times. It is disturbing to think that bad times could be imposed at will, needlessly, by a governor who seems hostile to the city’s needs and Mr. de Blasio’s agenda.

Mr. Cuomo’s budget deal is likely to have other highly praiseworthy components, like a significant increase in the minimum wage — a necessity, long overdue. But the other parts of the budget — the punitive parts, intended to make the undeserving citizens of Mr. de Blasio’s city suffer — need to be abandoned.”

Let’s hope that Governor Cuomo stops this insanity!

Tony

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