Albany Republicans’ $20B disgrace: spending madness – Latest News
Albany Republicans, the minority within the state Senate and Assembly for the final seven years, face a long hike back to political relevance.
They can begin by answering the $20 billion query.
That’s the distinction between what New York state expects to spend this fiscal 12 months — $148 billion, excluding federal support and borrowing — and what it will be spending if the final finances enacted with GOP help, in 2018, had saved growing solely on the fee of inflation.
That quantity is $128 billion.
Republicans accurately be aware state spending is greater than ever — and, given Albany’s reliance on a small subset of high earners, rising unsustainably.
But they’ll’t put the blame on the Democrats alone.
The $20 billion query isn’t about what Republicans would cut if voters again entrusted them to steer the state.
It’s a deeper problem: It asks them to clarify, to themselves particularly, how they’ll credibly declare to be the taxpayers’ champions after they not solely supported a lot of this fiscal bulge, however pushed to make it worse.
Most of the finances growth since 2018 has been in simply two packages: Medicaid and faculty support.
Republicans supposedly involved concerning the state’s fiscal image have repeatedly agitated for greater spending on each.
New York spends $4,942 per resident (enrolled or not) on Medicaid, per Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. That’s 23% more than the next-highest state, Kentucky, and double what New Jersey spends.
A reputable opposition social gathering could be hammering Gov. Kathy Hochul on this, arguing that this system is pushing up taxes, crowding out important companies and infrequently failing the weak people it’s meant to help.
But the tiny group of upstate fiscal hawks making these factors are undercut by their own Republican crew: Sen. Pat Gallivan, ostensibly his convention’s health care level man, final 12 months joined 1199 SEIU, the state’s largest health care union, to demand “Medicaid equity,” a budget-busting increase in what the state pays hospitals and different suppliers.
New York’s GOP can’t even credibly levy its evergreen grievance about “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid.
The Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, a once-tiny initiative meant to help a small group of people reside outdoors nursing properties, mushroomed into a $9 billion boondoggle that pays more than 400,000 people to take care of 250,000 New Yorkers.
Republicans ought to have been first to sound the alarm on CDPAP — but when Hochul proposed modest reforms by eliminating middlemen, they referred to as her suggestion a “full-blown catastrophe” and all however ignored the fiscal hemorrhaging.
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Josh Jensen, the highest Republican on the Assembly’s Health Committee, even objected to those that referred to as CDPAP a “racket” — which components of it had completely turn out to be.
The GOP has performed no higher on New York’s costliest-in-the-nation public faculties.
Expenditures statewide have zoomed previous $30,000 per scholar, and high $40,000 in lots of districts.
Yet when Hochul final 12 months tried tapping the brakes on these runaway prices, Doug Smith, the highest Republican on the Assembly Education Committee, and different GOP lawmakers stood actually shoulder-to-shoulder with the lecturers’ unions at a Long Island rally to oppose her.
Together they preserved computerized support hikes for rich however shrinking districts, filling empty school rooms with state money with out demanding higher outcomes.
New York’s most egregious practices — giving public staff computerized pay raises after their contracts expire, and making tenured lecturers almost unfireable — proceed with out GOP scrutiny.
The best mechanism for training accountability could be permitting more constitution faculties, giving mother and father higher choices.
But clarify that to Republican Assembly members like Jodi Giglio and Jarrett Gandolfo, who in 2023 posed in anti-charter videos on the lecturers’ union’s request.
That’s the Republicans’ downside in a nutshell: If a public worker union, or a trial lawyer, or the building trades may wrinkle a forehead, criticism about just about any state law, program or follow is off the desk.
Republicans comply with this rule as they use the MTA as a pinata-on-rails.
Fare hikes? Bad. Congestion pricing? A sin.
But strive getting the median GOP lawmaker to say one thing about bloated union contracts, or legal responsibility guidelines, or “prevailing wage” determinations pushing MTA prices to the moon.
Republican cravenness was by no means on larger show than in March 2024, when the Senate minority, together with Sens. Alexis Weik and Dean Murray, pushed to retroactively sweeten public worker pensions at a future taxpayer value of billions of {dollars}.
Albany Republicans don’t even uniformly oppose the state’s handouts to movie, tv and theater producers, which value taxpayers upward of $1 billion yearly.
It’s time for some severe introspection — about why state spending has gotten to date out of control, and about why Republicans have so little credibility to do one thing about it.
New York wants, and voters have traditionally rewarded, trustworthy critics of fiscal profligacy.
Can their GOP lawmakers be trustworthy with themselves first?
Ken Girardin is a fellow on the Manhattan Institute.
