This is advice that needs to be listened to and implemented. This states debt is out of control as is the spending and everything else under the sun.
N.Y. must limit debt, state comptroller warns
ALBANY — As the Spitzer administration mulls borrowing as much as $1 billion to help revive the upstate economy, the state’s top fiscal officer is warning that the state’s debt burden is already a problem and needs to be limited.
“The state’s increasing debt burden is a real concern,” said Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. “Debt is not a cost-free option. Every dollar we spend on paying off debt is another dollar that can’t be used for other public needs and services.”
DiNapoli on Friday proposed that borrowing be limited to 5 percent of the state’s personal income. That’s a lower figure than is currently the case — the figure is about 6.5 percent — but DiNapoli said his proposal is doable in part because it would be phased in over nine years.
His report found that state debt grew more than 31 percent between April 2002 and March 2007, to a total of more than $51 billion — more than most other states’ debt.
New York’s annual mortgage payment on that pile of debt is projected to rise from $4.6 billion this year to about $7.1 billion in five years, an average annual growth of nearly 9 percent.
And to DiNapoli’s dismay, much of the state’s debt — $11.5 billion — was used to cover operating deficits or provide budget relief, rather than to build new bridges or sewage-treatment plants or parks or other assets that will last for decades.
“We have to have a much greater sense of priorities,” he said in an interview.
There was no immediate response from Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who proposed more borrowing in his State of the State speech last week for economic development and presumably for housing.
Spitzer said the state should spend $1 billion on upstate economic-development projects — some of which he may lay out in his upstate “State of the State” speech Wednesday in Buffalo.
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