EDITORIALS
Washington: Help New York
Hit disproportionately by collapse, state needs some bailout assistance
Updated: 11/01/08 7:38 AM
Usually, when a man is forced to beg for money, the emotion he may have to hide is shame. Wednesday, when New York Gov. David A. Paterson went to Congress to ask for billions in federal aid to New York and other states, he would have been forgiven if the emotion he had to bottle up was anger.
The transcript of the governor’s spoken testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee shows that he was too diplomatic to vent that anger. But the longer written statement Paterson submitted made clear his completely reasonable feeling that the current fiscal meltdown that is dragging state and local budgets deep into the red is the result of failures by the federal government — failures that federal officials should partly atone for by providing money to the states and to programs that will lift further burdens that might otherwise fall upon the states.
New York is particularly hard hit by the financial crisis because Wall Street is the source of 20 percent of its revenue. While American taxpayers will quite reasonably think that the $700 billion bailout recently passed by Congress should not go into salaries, bonuses and other lofty Wall Street compensation packages, New York taxpayers will suffer as those flows of taxable income dry up.
Thus the justness of Paterson’s call for Congress to work rapidly toward another fiscal stimulus package. Rather than the individual tax rebates that Congress and the Bush administration settled on earlier this year, a diffuse use of money that seemed to have little impact, Paterson calls for other sorts of fiscal jumper cables that would be more concentrated in ways that will help the most.
Such methods of more effective stimulus would include lengthening the time people can collect unemployment insurance, boosting the federal share of programs that provide health care for the poor and coming up with billions across the nation to pay for roads, bridges, water treatment plants and other infrastructure projects that are not only necessary to enhance economic activity, but already designed and ready to build.
Paterson has, almost from the moment be became governor, made the case that New York government taxes too much and spends too much. That gives his message in Washington added depth. But, as he pointed out in Washington, he has already made more than $1 billion in budget cuts and is trying to make sure the Legislature squarely faces anticipated deficits of up to $47 billion over the next three years.
Cutting more, as the governor says, will not just hurt state bureaucrats. It will hurt the poor, the sick, the old and the children of all social classes that depend on public education from kindergarten to medical school.
Besides, further state cuts — or higher state taxes — will cause suffering by people who are in no way responsible for the larger crisis. New York’s state workers, the New Yorkers who pay their salaries and the New Yorkers who use the state’s many services did not cause the fiscal meltdown. That was the joint fault of the greedy on Wall Street and the asleep-at-the-switch regulators and legislators in Washington.
The sins of Washington should not be visited upon the people of New York. Congress, which took little time to dig up $700 billion for the very Masters of the Universe who ruined it all, should be quick about finding a few billion to help the states who provide needed services to everyone else.
