A true-blue liberal: Mario Cuomo was a tax-and-spend stalwart — and now son Andrew is shifting in the same direction. (David Rentas)
It took less than a year, but the Andrew Cuomo who learned politics at the knee of his ultraliberal father is finally showing his true colors.
Yes, for nearly 11 months, the new governor gave us hope that sanity was returning to New York state. He acted like a New Democrat — the philosophy of moderation on taxes and containing the size of government that under President Bill Clinton gave us years of bipartisan compromise and one of the great economic revivals this country has seen in a long time.
Cuomo, like Clinton, even said he wanted to end welfare as we knew it — which in the case of New York meant breaking the stranglehold of the public-sector unions that have been squeezing the state dry for years with their inordinate demands for higher wages and bigger benefits. He called for layoffs and union concessions as he balanced his first budget.
And he took raising taxes on the “rich” off the table — because, as he rightly pointed out, killer taxes on businesses and entrepreneurs are the big reason so many have left the state and taken their job-creation elsewhere.
He even said that he was ditching the absurd “millionaires tax,” which taxes people earning as low as $200,000 a year, and that the state needed to cut spending even as the national party was insisting that there was no limit to how much government can and should borrow and spend.
Cuomo seemed to grasp the common-sense fact that New York just can’t keep borrowing to pay for stuff it can’t afford, or it might end up looking like Greece and the rest of Europe.
In response, the public warmed to a guy who at bottom is a pretty cold fish. His approval ratings soared, and he was talked about as a possible presidential candidate when he gets done bringing reality back to New York.
No more.
As governor in the ’80s and early ’90s, Mario Cuomo gave us massive deficit spending, bond deals to paper over the size of his bloated government, stimulus packages that could never stimulate and massive business flight.
And Andrew Cuomo’s new plan to balance the budget and bolster the economy is right out of his father’s playbook.
There’s the tax hike on “the wealthy,” dressed up as some kind of tax reform. He isn’t yet specifying at what income level those allegedly rich people might be found. Will he choose the national party’s standard, families that bring in $250,000 a year?
Cuomo says these higher taxes will help pay for a tax break for the middle class. OK, but how does taxing business owners and entrepreneurs result in creating more jobs for working-class people? Before he went all Mario, Andrew himself said that it doesn’t.
Then there’s the claim that he can stimulate the economy by spending big bucks on so-called “infrastructure.” Sorry, history shows this will create few real jobs. It hasn’t for President Obama, and it didn’t for Gov. Mario Cuomo.
What’s next? Mario’s borrowing by decree — the use of state authorities to issue debt, circumventing the state Constitution’s voter-approval clause? If Andrew’s hiking taxes, you can bet the public-employee unions won’t see much more pain.
Some Andrew Cuomo supporters tell me I’m too hard on their guy. If he’s moving to the left, it’s mostly out of necessity — to placate the powerful liberal interest groups he needs to get re-elected. They claim he still made real progress in chipping away at New York’s massive welfare state in his first year.
But that’s when I remind them this is also the “reform” Housing secretary who in the 1990s pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee more subprime home loans — and the guy who served as his dad’s top adviser when Mario took the welfare state to new heights here in New York.
Yes, he had a few good months — but it takes more than that to truly be the reformer Andrew Cuomo promised he’d be.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.