New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Bill Hammond: Let’s hear it for Albany dysfunction
ALBANY - State lawmakers could end their session this week in one of two ways:

They could negotiate compromises in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation, pass a flurry of legislation and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Or they could bicker over trivial differences, engage in bitter finger-pointing and slink out of town with not much to show for the past six months.

Put me down in favor of Option 2. I’m rooting for an orgy of bickering, finger-pointing and slinking. At this point - to borrow from Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street” - gridlock is good.

Granted, a collapse in the last-minute talks between Gov. Pataki and legislative leaders would send pols home to their constituents empty-handed and fuel even more talk that Albany is broken. There’d be no rebate checks for property taxpayers, no extra money for hospitals and nursing homes and no guaranteed health coverage for employees of large companies - all of which are in the mix for possible horse trading.

But that’s just fine by me.

Those proposed property tax rebates - technically a refundable credit on income taxes - are a sorry substitute for real relief from a local tax burden that’s 83% heavier than the national average. Rather than getting rid of silly mandates that drive up those taxes, taming an out-of-control Medicaid program or discouraging excessive spending by local governments, legislators are basically trying to buy forgiveness. With $1 billion of our own money.

Throwing more cash at the health care system also makes little sense at this point. New York will spend more than $46 billion on Medicaid this year, almost as much as California and Texas combined. Even with cuts that Pataki wants to make, which the health care industry is complaining so bitterly about, the cost to taxpayers will grow by hundreds of millions.

And imposing a multibillion-dollar health insurance mandate on large employers, which some legislators want to do, would be a surefire way to kill the few remaining companies that manage to survive in upstate’s harsh business climate.

Continued….

The best thing that could happen right now is to just call it quits and send them home before they vote for any more insane taxes…. It would be a different story if they actually debated issues on the floor of each house, but they don’t.

I can see a flurry of votes at the last minute of a late session and us not finding out for weeks what they all voted for..