Paterson Defends Budget
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- March
- 30
Gov. David Paterson said “none of this makes sense” when it comes to raising fees and taxes, limiting growth in aid to schools and health care and threatening job cuts. But he said the state’s budget deficit grew to $17.7 billion, so the moves had to be made.
He rejected that the budget raises spending by nearly 9 percent over what he proposed in December (even though that’s what his office said in a press release yesterday), saying a bulk of the roughly $10 billion in spending is through money from the stimulus package, which comes to about $6 billion.
He said the rest is mainly through higher costs for Medicaid and social-service programs.
“None of this makes sense,” he said when asked if the new taxes and fees make sense in the face of the state’s economic woes. “We don’t want to tax the wealthy, we don’t put these taxes in to raise fees, we don’t want to hold our school budgets at zero increase at a time when our children need education. We don’t want to in any way jeopardize anyone’s ability to get health care.
“We don’t want to lay workers off. It’s a response to a crisis.”
Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, D-Queens, said “this is not a happy budget” and defended the need to negotiate the budget behind closed doors, saying “Difficult times call for different approaches” but that transparency is still important.
“I’m not happy about all the things we had to do in this budget. But what I am pleased about is that we were responsible,” Smith said. “We made the tough choices.”
Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos, R-Long Island, fired back with a news release this afternoon saying that the budget will mean an upstate family of four will have to pay about $2,400 more a year in higher state taxes and fees as a result of the budget, while in New York City and the surrounding suburbs, a family will pay $4,700 to $5,000 more.
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 12:55 pm by Joseph Spector.
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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. 
