There’s no real mystery as to why it’s near impossible to take serious whacks at the state budget.
Just check the “Fat Cat Factor” — the New York Public Interest Group’s annual study of special-interest lobbying power in Albany.
Health care and school aid together make up more than half of state spending.
No surprise, then, that efforts to control spending in those areas generates the most voracious — to say nothing of expensive — opposition.
Five of the Top 10 lobbying and campaign-donating entities in 2009 were, broadly speaking, part of the health-care cartel.
No. 1 was the Healthcare Education Project — an unholy alliance of the Greater New York Hospital Association and SEIU 1199, the health-care workers union — which spent $3.8 million in an ad campaign against mild cuts suggested by the governor.
The most notorious ad featured a wheelchair-bound blind man asking: “Gov. Paterson, why are you doing this to me?”
The cuts never materialized.
Separately, the hospital association spent another $2.1 million and 1199 tossed in $1.5 million in lobbying activities.
Also in the Top 10: the teachers unions — the city’s United Federation of Teachers and its parent New York State United Teachers (No. 2).
Their combined spending — $4.7 million — was also productive, as evidenced by yet another teacher-pension sweetener signed into law earlier this month.
With no effective push-back from the business community, taxpayer watchdogs or just ordinary New Yorkers, Albany politicians respond only to the special interests pulling their strings — and the state slowly runs out of money.