Brace yourself for despair when Gov. Hochul rolls out her 2025 agenda in her State of the State address Tuesday.
With Hochul’s long record of closing her ears to the public — on crime, taxes, congestion pricing, energy — it’s beyond safe to expect more of the same this year, especially given the early leaks of her plans.
Fine, with the state spending close to $240 billion a year, she’ll call for some nice-sounding new outlays (youth mental health services; free school meals, even for those whose families can pay).
But she’ll completely ignore what voters really want.
Take congestion pricing. New Yorkers opposed it by a whopping 51%-to-29% margin, per a Siena poll last month, and she knew full well how unpopular it was — which is why she “paused” it over the summer.
But then revived it just days after the November election.
Her green agenda, too, is inflicting major pain, yet instead of dialing back, she’s expected to push for a new “cap and invest” program, hitting up oil companies that’ll simply pass their new costs to consumers.
Which means you’ll pay more for gasoline, home heating and cooking, electricity, etc., so Albany can “invest” in subsidies for unreliable alternative energy sources.
Likewise, though New York has had the highest state and local taxes in the nation, Hochul refuses to lift a finger to lower them. Instead, she’s raised them further — and may do so again this year.
All this, as she claims she wants to make life more “affordable” here.
Nor will she dare push for major fixes to the state’s disastrous criminal-justice “reforms” — like cashless bail and Raise the Age — even though they’ve driven up crime since their passage five years ago.
Not because Hochul believes in that nonsense; she’s simply unwilling to take on the Legislature’s progressive loons and the special interests that feast off of Albany’s sky-high spending.
Any governor dedicated to improving life in New York would aim to, say, fix the state’s broken crime laws and scrap the cap on public charter schools (which routinely outperform traditional public schools).
But Hochul doesn’t dare challenge Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who oppose such efforts.
No wonder that Siena poll found 57% of New York voters prefer “someone else” besides Hochul for governor, with only 33% saying they’d vote to reelect her.
It’s also why New Yorkers have been fleeing to other states: Census data in October showed the state lost a bigger share of its population than any other in 2023.
True, New York’s been shrinking relative to the rest of the nation for long decades — but the trend is now accelerating.
And Hochul’s State of the State will only provide still more reasons to head for the hills.
The voters who stay in New York will get to express their displeasure by electing “someone else” next year.
