What more do we need to know than these two quotes? We are still headed in the wrong direction in this state, everyone thought Spitzer would at least attempt to turn us around… Wrong, we were all wrong.

Spitzer dragging New York into an even deeper hole

A liberal think tank has put out a report showing the deep financial hole that New York State has dug for all of its citizens.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say that when you find yourself in a hole, “stop digging.”

New York is still digging, and might make it all the way through to China.

The data from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities shows the on-budget deficit is equal to 8 percent of the entire state budget. The deficit is how much you borrow to keep going, year to year.

Other data shows the accumulated state debt tops $12,000 for every man, woman and child, and is growing at a rate of more than 9 percent a year. The debt is the total of everything you owe the banks.

Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer and the Legislature are waltzing with nostalgia.

If deep down they sense that the tax base of the old New York doesn’t exist any more, they just won’t accept it.

As industry flees upstate, Wall Street’s monopoly on American investments is being outsourced.

Worse, the governor and the legislators imagine they’re down here where the government can simply print money when it gets into a jam, as it has been doing frantically for two months.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says New York’s $4.4 billion projected deficit is second largest among big states. California is first. The difference is that California’s economy is yeasty, and New York’s is not.

Virginia’s deficit is going to be 6.9 percent of spending. But Virginia, driven by robust growth in the Washington suburbs, will have no trouble meeting the deficit as it has in the past by slashing spending and freezing payrolls. (You won’t see Spitzer “slash payrolls”….Union Buddies you know….CSEA and the like!!)

The Business Council of New York State voices “concern” over Spitzer’s proposed six-figure increase in the state payroll — now the largest per capita of any state.

It is hard to understand Spitzer’s mindset unless he imagines New York’s listing ship can be righted by centralized economic planning, like some Eastern European satellite of the 1960s.

Waving a wand didn’t work then, and it won’t work in New York now.

The governor’s plan assumes New York can somehow be isolated from the world economy, or even from competing states where businesses function without the permission of unions or rule-making commissars.

He talks about a $1 billion development fund for upstate, and another big endowment for the state university.

But any money for upstate and the long-underfunded SUNY must be borrowed. Amazingly, Spitzer volunteered that he doesn’t want tuition increases. Sorry, students, but SUNY’s tuition is comparatively, unrealistically low.

State Comptroller Thomas Di- Napoli has suggested that very soon the state may be borrowed out. The dramatic increase in borrowing, he said, “raises concerns about the sustainability of New York’s borrowing practices.” The state’s debt has increased almost a third since 2003.

DiNapoli said right now the state pays $4.7 billion a year in interest to the banks to borrow money — more than the annual deficit. That’s without the big kitties for upstate or SUNY, or the new state employees or the $1.5 billion increase for schools.

This annual state “mortgage payment” will grow to more than $7 billion a year in just four years, he said. This swelling of debts and interest payments makes the state the nation’s most notorious panhandler.

Upstate doesn’t need the promise of an ephemeral development fund. Spitzer has the whole vision thing backward. He’s raising $2 billion more in increased taxes and fees.

Business needs deep tax cuts, regulatory relief and the promise of more tax cuts by slashing bloated and unrealistic payrolls, squarely facing the doomsday pension bomb and closing commissions and authorities.

dturner@buffnews.com

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