Anyone who’d hoped that Kathy Hochul, now a duly elected governor, would finally show restraint in spending taxpayer money had to be bitterly disappointed by the $227 billion budget she rolled out last week.
Her bottom line grows 2.4%, which sounds reasonable but — as Nicole Gelinas notes — is actually 29% higher than the state’s pre-COVID level. And it commits New York to an unsustainable, stratospheric spending baseline.
Is all this spending absolutely necessary? Not by a long shot.
Take Medicaid, a program badly in need of reform: Per the Division of Budget, New York will break $100 billion in outlays under Hochul’s plan. That’s more than any other state has spent recently, except California (which has twice New York’s population).
All that cash is needed to cover more people on Medicaid, as a percentage of the population, than in most other states — and higher costs per enrollee. The Empire Center’s Bill Hammond points out one example: The $12 billion a year New Yorkers cough up for in-home “personal care” is nearly as much as the other 49 states combined.
And get this: The tab for Hochul’s plan would be higher still if she weren’t looking to pass off a larger share of Medicaid’s costs to local governments. That’s “a step backwards,” as the Citizens Budget Commission notes, after the state some years back froze that share, forcing Albany to use its own money for the higher Medicaid spending it mandates.
The gov also wants to boost yearly handouts to the film and TV industry from $420 million to $700 million. That’s a whopping 66% jump, worsening a monumental abuse of taxpayer dollars.
And she aims to pump up education funding by a ridiculous 10%, to $34 billion, even as enrollments plummet and despite the fact that New York already burns up about twice as much per student as other states, on average, while producing only average results.
Then there’s the $1 billion she’s setting aside to accommodate migrants who are here only because President Joe Biden encouraged them to come while providing no federal funding to cover locals’ costs.
Albany’s coffers are fine now, but Hochul’s spending plan sets up truly monstrous shortfalls for the state — totaling more than $20 billion through 2027. How on Earth will that gap be closed? The gov herself has stressed the importance of not raising New York’s highest-in-the-nation taxes, so she should be cutting costs now, not raising them.
