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ALBANY – Gov. Cuomo yesterday condemned the entire state budget process as a scam ginned up by special interests that added as much as $9 billion to the deficit before anyone – the governor included – laid a hand on the upcoming spending plan.
The proposal is expected to call for the most severe cuts in state history. On the eve of his first budget address today, Cuomo released a bombshell op-ed column for the state’s newspapers comparing the “sham” process by which state leaders craft each year’s spending plan to the best schemes of insurance companies and Wall Street bankers he battled as attorney general.
The Democratic executive expressed “shock” to find a projected 13 percent spending increase driven largely by a series of automatic spending increases buried into law by generations of lobbyists and complicit legislators.
Such permanent rate hikes and formulas ensure that spending in areas like education and Medicaid continue to explode despite annual budget cuts.
“When a governor takes office, in many ways the die has already been cast,” Cuomo said of the budget increases.
“This is the system that has brought New York to the brink, and it is why we are the highest ‘spending-and-taxing’ state in the nation with programs that fail to perform for the people.
“This all must end.”
If not for such laws, the current budget gap might only be $1 billion or $2 billion — not the $10 billion often cited by his own budget officials, Cuomo said.
Such “current services” budgeting is commonplace among states and the federal government and went on during Cuomo’s father’s 12 years as governor. Cuomo, however, said New York should plan spending based on “objective, fair criteria,” like program enrollment, the rate of inflation and personal-income growth.
Cuomo is required to formally unveil his 2011-12 spending plan today. It is expected to call for thousands of layoffs and massive cuts in school aid.
Cuomo’s clarion call on the budget formulas that pump up deficits will likely set up even more bruising battles with the state Assembly. Administration officials said they would propose legislation separate from the budget in the coming months to permanently substitute existing schemes with new, more rational formulas.
The declaration came just hours before he convened legislative leaders in a closed-door meeting to detail plans to slash $10 billion in planned expenses, including aid to schools, hospitals and local governments. The city stood to lose a total $1 billion alone.
Cuomo was also expected to call for a round of agency mergers, 10 or more prison closures and as many as 10,000 state layoffs.
Budget hawks praised Cuomo for upending the inevitable fight over spending cuts with his op-ed, which is published in full on the opposite page.
” ‘Listen up, folks,’ he’s saying,” said E.J. McMahon of the business-backed Manhattan Institute. “You’re going to start hearing a lot about devastating cuts. You need to take it all with a grain of salt.”
McMahon said Cuomo’s condemnation represented a clear “shot across the bow” for the Legislature and, in particular, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), who has been a leading advocate for current-services budgeting that includes the automatic spending increases.
Silver deflected questions about whether he thought the process was a “sham.”
“You can call it what you want to call it, [but] there are serious issues,” Silver said. “There are, I believe, serious cuts to be made and serious gaps to close.”
Others openly mocked Cuomo’s tone of surprise, which they compared to Police Capt. Renault’s being famously “shocked, shocked” at finding gambling in “Casablanca.”
James Parrott of the labor-backed Fiscal Policy Institute criticized Cuomo for attempting to cast widely accepted budget practices in a criminal light.
“There’s no secret to it,” Parrott said. “What’s surprising is that the governor should be surprised by this at this stage in the game. Makes you wonder about how many other things he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”