Gov. Hochul just rolled out a characteristically careful budget that points toward fiscal sanity.
Let’s hope she sticks to her guns against the coming demands from the tax-and-spendaholic Legislature.
The gov has no new taxes in her $233 billion budget proposal and vows that if lawmakers push for a hike, she’ll tell them to go take one.
Good: New York already has the heaviest state- and local-tax burden in the country, and it’s driving people to flee.
And where Albany usually adds billions in new outlays, she aims to keep overall spending roughly flat.
State-funded outlays rise 4.5%, a bit more than inflation, offsetting drops in federal aid.
Budget rollbacks would be better: As the Citizens Budget Commission warns, in three years, the state will face a mammoth $15 billion budget gap — and that’s assuming Albany doesn’t need to help with migrant costs after this year, a huge risk.
Hochul also has no specific plans to keep Medicaid from bankrupting the state: It soared 38% over the past three years.
Yet she does deserve credit for focusing attention on that $27 billion-and-counting money-gobbler, as well as on education costs still soaring amid declining enrollments.
Her plan calls for slowing the growth of school aid ($35.3 billion) and shifting funds to account for population changes and to favor higher-need districts.
All commendable — though Hochul herself notes per-student outlays here blow away those in most other states, and her plans won’t lower those costs one cent.
Hochul rightly flags the state’s housing shortage, blaming it for fueling outmigration that’s cost the state $6 billion in revenue, and she offered decent ideas to address it.
One disappointing sign: She failed to utter a word about fixing criminal-justice laws — cashless bail, Raise the Age — despite claiming public safety is her “No. 1 priority.”
She clearly fears being rebuffed by prog lawmakers. But if she can’t win their backing to address her top priority, how will she resist new tax hikes and added budget bloat?
Hochul often shows she knows what’s right for New York. Let’s hope that this year she can get lawmakers to go along.
