Gov. Cuomo smiled brightly yesterday, gazed out on a gaggle of Albany regulars — and told them his new budget is meant to break their rice bowls.
Regulars like Billy Easton — a shill for the state’s public-education lobby, who responded by proclaiming upcoming cataclysm for New York schoolkids.
Easton fronts a special-interest mail drop called the Alliance for Quality Education, which is instructive.
For AQE is:
* An alliance only insofar as it’s the creature of lefty rabble-rousers like Citizen Action of New York (Working Hard To End The War In Iraq!) and the utterly corrupt Working Families Party.
* Disinterested in quality education, but obsessed with the quality of educators’ pay — why else would the state’s largest teachers union have just dumped $420,000 into AQE’s bank account?
Here’s what Easton had to say yesterday about Gov. Cuomo’s potentially transformative 2011-2012 state budget:
“[It] pulls the rug out on children’s education by cutting literacy programs, career and technical education, college prep, pre-K, arts, music, sports, tutoring, guidance counselors and school librarians, and if it’s passed, it will be the same as selling our kids to Barbary slavers to be chained to galley oars.”
Just kidding about the galley oars.
But not about this: Spending on public education in New York has gone up an unsustainable 70 percent over the past decade — even as inflation increased by a relatively modest 23 percent.
Still, the unions were expecting another huge payday — 13 percent on top of all that’s come before — in the new budget.
So was the state’s health-care cartel.
Never mind that Medicaid spending in New York is up 80 percent over the past 10 years (again, against 23 percent inflation).
But if the hospitals and the health-care union don’t get the 13 percent they were expecting, “it will decimate New York’s health-care infrastructure, threaten access to care and harm communities,” said a spokesman.
Apocalypse tomorrow?
“No,” said Cuomo.
That’s yesterday’s rhetoric.
Cuomo admits to the dislocations his budget will create. But he insists on redefining the annual debate.
Monday, he publicly made his case: Albany’s recurring “deficits” — and the enervating crises that accompany them — are constructs of creative, special-interest-driven accounting practices that must be brought to an end.
And yesterday he repeated it to the assembled capital worthies — most of whom have been slurping from the trough for years.
But Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver didn’t fundamentally disagree with Cuomo’s diagnosis — he just said the problem wasn’t the Legislature’s fault (and he wasn’t entirely wrong about that).
Could it mean that the cagey old speaker is taking blowback from his members — who doubtless are hearing from their constituents?
Cue the tinkle of breaking rice bowls.
Bob McManus is the Editorial Page editor of The Post