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This article is good and I would hope all of our representatives in Albany get a copy of it. I posted the highlights for more details read the whole thing. The author is spot on with many of the issues but he forgot a few of them so I will add my two cents.

We need a major hiring freeze, no more state employees for the foreseeable future. Pensions? All we need to do is collect state taxes from the retired state employees and this will help immensely. Taylor Law and Wickes Laws need to be dismantled. Taxes? Cut them across the board including business taxes, property taxes and all the hidden little taxes that drive up our costs.

Can you imagine if we just did all this we would be bailed out in no time, money would be available to spend and invest.. Wow, what a concept. Albany!!! Are you listening?

A simple guide to cutting the New York budget

The bad news: The Wall Street meltdown has opened a gaping hole in the state budget.

The good news: Gov. Paterson and the Legislature can easily find billions in savings without harming basic services.

Albany lawmakers have been spending like drunken hedge-fund managers for so long, there’s no shortage of obvious ways to economize. Closing a $1.2 billion deficit this year - and $6.4 billion next year - may be politically tricky, but it’s not brain surgery.

Herewith, a guide to Budget-Cutting for Dummies:

First, do no harm. Forget about launching big, expensive new programs.

Tame the Medicaid beast. Albany has allowed this health insurance program to grow so bloated that New York spends as much on Medicaid as California and Florida combined.

Cash in the law-and-order dividend. Close and consolidate prisons that have emptied out thanks to plunging crime rates.

Get real on education spending. Cancel the scheduled $2 billion increase in school aid, an idealistic goal the state can no longer afford. Just holding education funding at its current level - which happens to be the most generous in the nation - would reduce the deficit by a third.

Go cold turkey on pork. Eliminate the pork-barrel slush funds that individual lawmakers dole out to community groups in their districts.

Drive a harder bargain with labor. Paterson should give the public employee unions a choice: Agree to trim excessively generous health and retirement benefits or face the prospect of layoffs

End corporate welfare as we know it. Throwing money at profit-making businesses is the wrong way to create jobs and simply can’t be justified when you’re pinching pennies on education and health care. To improve the economy, make smart investments in infrastructure instead.