Gov. Cuomo laid an imposing pile of words on the Albany establishment yesterday — his second State of the State message being long on self-congratulation but short on detailed policy prescription.
To be sure, Cuomo spread the kudos thickly. Just about everybody who had anything to do with last year’s legislative session got an attaboy. (Some of them were even deserved.)
And, as Gov. Cuomo the Elder used to say, such speeches are for rhetoric; details come later, in the state budget.
“New Yorkers were hurting [last year],” Cuomo said. Nevertheless, “we accomplished much.” There’s more than a little truth in that.
Now he promises to accomplish more. He promises a balanced budget “with no new taxes.” (Hmm, where have we heard that before?)
He wants to open New York wide to casino gambling; build a huge convention center at Aqueduct race track in Queens; lard the state with hundreds of millions in “economic-development” programs ($1 billion for Buffalo alone) — and raise billions more for roads and bridges.
All well and good, even if it does seem more than a little ambitious for a state as economically fragile as New York.
Part of that fragility, of course, is a function of the fact that more than a third of New Yorkers are enrolled in one welfare program or another — an unsustainable burden on the public fisc.
That Cuomo yesterday promised to make dependency even more attractive in New York City by loosening eligibility requirements for food stamps is more than a little disconcerting, frankly.
So, too, was his bragging about having cut state taxes, notwithstanding the fact that he actually hiked Albany’s take by $1.6 billion.
Cuomo called New York “the progressive capital of the nation” — which, sad to say, it is. And which, even more sad to say, largely explains the state’s decades-long rolling fiscal crisis.
Cuomo is a liberal Democrat, so maybe it’s too much to expect that he won’t govern like one.
And maybe it was too much to hope that he would go aggressively to bat for a proven, almost-overnight job-creation plan — hydrofracking for natural gas.
But he had not a peep for the program in his speech — and that’s worrisome.
Yes, he delivered a blistering (and well-deserved) attack on New York’s education cartel.
And he promised long-overdue reform of the state’s ludicrously expensive public-pension systems.
But meaningful reform always generates showers of political sparks — not the enthusiastic applause the governor got from the Albany establishment yesterday.
No sparks, no progress.
All else is rhetoric.