{"id":242931,"date":"2026-05-25T09:05:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/242931\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T09:05:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:05:28","slug":"albany-saved-some-of-its-ugliest-budget-poison-for-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/242931\/","title":{"rendered":"Albany saved some of its ugliest budget poison for last"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gov. Kathy Hochul<\/a> and the Legislature\u2019s leaders saved the worst for last: The final bits of their budget deals include some truly ugly idiocy.<\/p>\n

Beyond the budget\u2019s obscene $268.5 billion bottom line<\/a> is election-year pandering to special interests and ideological extremes, all at the public\u2019s expense.<\/p>\n

In a fit of moral preening, the state\u2019s Democratic leaders imposed a package of anti-ICE measures banning immigration-cooperation by local law enforcement and prohibiting local jails from holding lawbreakers on behalf of ICE.<\/p>\n

They also banned banning mask-wearing by federal agents (while refusing to do anything about masked rioters).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Add robbery in plain sight: Hochul handed the state\u2019s public-employee unions $557 million in new pension benefits by rolling back prior reforms. <\/p>\n

Teachers get to start collecting at age 58; all employees get to contribute less toward their own retirement payouts \u2014 and play even more OT pension-padding games.<\/p>\n

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This unfunded mandate<\/a> will force school districts and local governments to hike property and other taxes to cover the added hundreds of millions in yearly costs.<\/p>\n

And roughly a third of the state legislators voting for it will benefit from the changes.<\/p>\n

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The budget deal will also extend a special tax on health insurance, driving premiums needlessly higher, and divert $100 million in Medicaid money to subsidize a benefit fund for \u201clow-income\u201d members of health-care union 1199 SEIU.<\/p>\n

The insurance tax was originally part of a scam to boost the state\u2019s take from federal funds, but the feds have closed that loophole so now it\u2019s purely about feeding Albany\u2019s appetite.<\/p>\n

We expect more poisonous \u201cgifts\u201d to materialize down the road; the rush to pass these bills will once again guarantee that even most legislators won\u2019t know everything they\u2019re passing into law.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, with the legislative session set to run to June 17, they\u2019ll have another three weeks to add more misery with non-budget legislation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature\u2019s leaders saved the worst for last: The final bits of their budget…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4241,10691,304,67,19777,2035,3410,426,7050,9,11,10,49,51,50,299,240,4281,82],"class_list":["post-242931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-albany","tag-carl-heastie","tag-editorial","tag-education","tag-government-spending","tag-ice","tag-illegal-immigrants","tag-kathy-hochul","tag-medicaid","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-opinion","tag-pensions","tag-state-budget","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242931","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=242931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}