The only thing that Silver and the Assembly Democrats know how to do is raise taxes and steal money out of our pockets. Why are we in this mess, why are we looking at almost a 5 billion dollar hole….

A quick look at recent history will explain. Spitzer’s first budget exploded from 11.5 billion to 123 billion…. and then Albany added to that. This is insanity.

Paterson Warns Against Tax Hike

He Will Resist New Levies on Top Earners
Governor Paterson, sharing concerns aired by Mayor Bloomberg, is signaling that he will resist a push by Assembly Democrats to raise taxes on New York’s wealthy.

After emerging yesterday from his first City Hall meeting with Mr. Bloomberg since becoming governor on Monday, Mr. Paterson expressed strong reservations about a tax hike and said the state could produce a balanced budget without resorting to one as long as revenues stopped their slide.

While the governor didn’t go as far as his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, who had ruled out a tax increase during his last days in office, Mr. Paterson spoke more negatively about the idea than previously, and went as far as to suggest that the state’s top earners have already suffered enough from the sagging economy.

“I think that we should be thinking at this time about how we got our economy in the place that it is. So I think the foremost area that we would want to address is to tighten our belts,” Mr. Paterson said. “Not to drive up taxes for a constituency that has been, I would say, just battered over the past number of years. And compared to other states, I don’t think that this is where we should be going,” he said.

The Democratic governor’s position put him at odds with the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, who has defended his chamber’s tax plan as an emergency measure — the only reasonable recourse, he argued, to close a state budget gap that has soared past $5 billion.

“I’m just suggesting that somewhere you need a balanced budget. …The question is how does that gap get filled,” Mr. Silver said on Tuesday.