Have you ever had to pay your own bills?
With your own money from your own paycheck that you earned with your own labor?
Are you in that ever-shrinking percentage of Americans?
If so, then you might think that New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie is nuts. Off-his-rocker, certifiable, thinks-he’s-Napolean nuts.
Last night, he went on TV and talked about New York’s finances.
Which, by the way, are screwed with a capital F.
Albany begins this year’s legislative session with something near $15 billion in deficit. That’s about one-third covid and two-thirds they’re idiots and can’t balance the books. Heastie, in commenting on that massive hole, said that that wasn’t the point. The point was that he and his colleagues had found more need, and so they want not just the $15 billion extra to pay yesterday’s tab, but a whole lot more for new bells and whistles that they want to buy.
Presented with the concept that maybe there wasn’t enough money for new bells and whistles, the speaker said: “I want to make sure that supply meets demand.”
Which is where you come in.
You are supply. You are a taxpayer.
And perhaps the most important player in the state’s fiscal future just took the limit off your credit card.
It turns out his budgeting model is probably 100% ass backwards from yours. See, you, being a producer, probably look at your family or business budget and figure out how much you have. Then you make your expenses fit into that.
That’s called living within your means.
And that’s hate speech in Albany.
So they turn it around.
In Albany, they put together a big list of everything everybody wants, and then they figure out who to tax, borrow or beg the money from to pay for it.
You determine demand, and then you go find supply.
It turns out life without restraint, a governmental economic system based on entitlement, is very popular at the ballot box – as evidenced by the fact that Democrats hold a supermajority-for-life on every statewide office or body in New York.
Giving voters other people’s money apparently resonates with the electorate.
Anyway, Heastie said the Assembly wants $3 billion to pay people’s rent – on top of the other billions in housing assistance – as well as welfare for illegal aliens, and more money for transit systems, which are in tough shape because nobody rides them anymore.
Expected cost: “Multiples of billions.”
That’s a direct quote.
And it has to be very useful information for the folks in the budget office, who will be sure and enter “multiples of billions” in the ledger as an expenditure.
So, pressed on where this money comes from, the speaker had an answer.
“It would be great,” he said, “for the federal government to give us a big, fat check that takes care of all our needs.”
Footnote: That has been the official motto of the Democratic Party since the mid-1960s.
Well, that’s the official English motto. The official official motto is a direct quote from Marx in German.
But back to the “big, fat check.”
That will be a gift from Joe Biden and the voters of Georgia.
With Democratic control of everything in Washington, D.C., figuring out the New York state budget just got a whole lot easier. As opposed to selling the organs of the rich, Albany now needs merely extend its cupped hand toward Washington and say, “Gimme!” the Democrat magic word.
Which is how the speaker can dismiss a $15 billion deficit in his budget and simultaneously call to dramatically expand state spending.
Which makes perfect sense, because it’s only right that states which give their own citizens limited welfare benefits should be tapped to pay for New York’s Cadillac welfare benefits. And a nation tottering on the verge of insolvency because of deficit and debt should absolutely be forced deeper into debt in order to bail out a state unwilling to fix its own financial problems.
New York is the progressive capital of the nation, the governor said, and that means spending somebody else’s money. And that’s what the Empire State plans to do.
The plan isn’t to figure out how to live within our means, it is to demand that someone else provide the supply to meet our demand.
Which is where you, the taxpayer, come in.