said<\/a>, four times.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe problem came when reporters spoke to Assembly Speaker Carl\u00a0Heastie.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no deal,\u201d the Bronx Democrat said. \u201cI just think it was very premature for the governor to make this announcement.\u201d<\/p>\n
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In videos of the moment,\u00a0Heastie looks grumpy. Well, yes, he often looks\u00a0that way. But this time, more than usual. He might have even been angry.<\/p>\n
If so, you can understand why. If you\u2019re negotiating to sell your house, you don\u2019t want to find the buyers sitting in the living room before the deal has closed. Pretending to have an agreement when you don\u2019t is an act of bad faith, and in this case, the governor seemed to be twisting the Legislature\u2019s proverbial arm into a deal lawmakers weren\u2019t ready to make.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At least I think that was the strategy. Quite a few observers were genuinely befuddled by the governor\u2019s move when many\u00a0not-so-minor details hadn\u2019t been hammered out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe signed off on nothing major,\u201d said grumpy Heastie, who added that the process is broken because governors insist on stuffing so much nonfiscal policy into the budget.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cI\u2019m saying this to you all very clearly: I am never doing this again,\u201d Heastie said. \u201cBudgets are supposed to be about money, not policy.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t precisely clear to me what\u00a0Heastie won\u2019t do again. But if lawmakers reject the policies jammed into the next budget by\u00a0Gov. Bruce Blakeman\u00a0\u2014 just kidding!\u00a0\u2014 New York will be better off. It\u2019s a bad and fundamentally undemocratic way to govern, as everyone knows. It stymies debate about laws that deserve to be debated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In any event, Hochul\u2019s deal-that-wasn\u2019t-a-deal includes $268 billion in spending. If that seems like a lot, well, it is.<\/p>\n
Consider that the sum is 26% higher than the $212 billion budget approved by lawmakers five years ago. The budget, at least as Hochul described it, also includes $14 billion more in spending than what was approved last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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And here\u2019s betting that the top line will have climbed higher once the T’s are crossed on a finalized budget. The answer to every problem is more spending, after all, and heading in the other direction isn\u2019t even a consideration.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s where I could point out that New York\u2019s state government spends more than twice as much as Florida, despite having a smaller population. But that would lead to a chorus of emails telling me how cheap, awful and ineffective Florida\u2019s government is, along with some diatribes about the terribleness of Ron\u00a0DeSantis, the state\u2019s Republican governor.<\/p>\n
So I will instead note that Hochul\u2019s deal-that-wasn\u2019t-a-deal would spend just $81 billion less than the $349 billion budget proposed in California, even though that state has double the population. I may also get a few diatribes about the awfulness of Gavin Newsom, but the point is that New York lawmakers continue to spend like sailors on shore leave, six beers in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Hochul didn\u2019t mention that in her congratulatory press conference. Nor will most lawmakers, when and if a budget deal is truly done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gov. Kathy Hochul told the media that New York has a budget deal on Thursday at the state…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[33237,844,9,11,10,49,51,50,12522,1165],"class_list":["post-225055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-column-churchill","tag-latestnews","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-opiniontu","tag-state-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}