CBO: Things are even worse in NY than they appear
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- January
- 12
That $15 billion deficit Gov. David Paterson has been talking about for next year? Maybe he’s being a little too optimistic.
E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center, a conservative think tank, pointed out today that the Congressional Budget Office forecasts a worse national economy than Paterson’s Budget Division has predicted.
The office sees a higher national unemployment this year (8.3 percent compared to state Budget Division estimate of 7.6 percent), an actual shrinkage in the gross domestic product this year of .4 percent while the state sees an increase of .8 percent, and an inflation rate of 0.1 percent instead of 1.4 percent.
Overall, McMahon said of the federal estimates are accurate, the state will get $60 million less in tax revenue than they are now forecasting.
Just what the Legislature and Paterson, who has already proposed $9 billion in cuts and $3 billion in new taxes and fees, wants to hear.
Budget Division spokesman Jeffrey Gordon pointed out that the CBO numbers are based on more recent data than the state figures. The state numbers will be updated later this week when Paterson introduces amendments to his spending plan, which lawmakers are supposed to adopt by April 1.
This entry was posted
on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 11:16 am by Jay Gallagher.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
