Metro

Can’t trust these bozos to fix the mess they created

ALBANY — Mayor Bloom berg got it right yesterday with his flip observation that Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch’s scheme to borrow $6 billion to reform state spending “doesn’t pass the laugh test.”

Ravitch’s plan actually makes anyone who knows anything about what’s gone on in state government for the past 30 years want to cry.

Ravitch apparently thinks New York is still in his own glory days of the mid-1970s, when Wall Street and corporate titans like himself joined labor union statesmen at the behest of newly elected Gov. Hugh Carey to bring a near-bankrupt state back from the brink.

What else could explain Ravitch’s naive proposal to have four top state politicians name five fiscal experts “from the professional or business world” to a new Financial Review Board to oversee state finances?

Hasn’t Ravitch looked around the halls of the Capitol since arriving here in July to see who inhabits them these days? Frankly, you wouldn’t want to trust your personal piggy bank to the lot of them.

Ravitch insists the panel would be made up of the best and the brightest.

Yet he expects the public to put its faith in selections made by his scandal-scarred lame-duck boss, Gov. Paterson, who gets two picks; state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, who owes his job to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the state’s leading advocate of runaway spending; to Silver himself; and to Senate Democratic leader John Sampson, who can barely keep control of his own members.

Ravitch offered the complex plan — which some experts say could take six months to draft into legislation — three weeks before a new state budget is due. Duh?

He proposed giving Paterson extraordinary authority to control state spending that the Democratic-controlled Legislature refused to grant in December, and is even less inclined to do so now. Huh?

Here’s the final reason to be critical of the Ravitch plan.

The true effect of the Ravitch’s $6 billion bonding proposal will be to open the door to another round of massive borrowing to avoid the tough decisions needed to bring fiscal sanity to New York.

How perfectly Albany to cast as budget reform another outrage against the taxpayers.