Empire State Building (A Budget)

If New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo's budget agreement looks familiar -- eliminating a surcharge tax on the state's wealthy, making cuts to Medicare and education, and laying off state workers -- there's a reason for that.  Even relatively blue states like New York have to deal with Republicans that control at least one chamber in the statehouse, and in the case of the state senate, Cuomo did much of their austerity work for them.

Dashing the hopes of many Democratic lawmakers, including the bulk of the New York City delegation, the budget did not include an extension of a temporary income tax surcharge on wealthy New Yorkers, a measure that has drawn support among Democrats and even some Senate Republicans as a way to further offset Mr. Cuomo’s proposed cuts in money for schools and other programs.

Mr. Cuomo persuaded legislative leaders to agree to a year-to-year cut of more than $2 billion in spending on health care and education, historically the two largest drivers of New York’s budget. Over all, officials said, the budget deal would reduce year-to-year spending by about 2 percent.

For both Medicaid and education, the deal calls for a two-year appropriation instead of the traditional one year’s worth of financing, locking in fixed rates of growth through Mr. Cuomo’s second year in office and potentially allowing him to avoid a repeat of the battles he fought this year with teachers’ unions and other special interests.

In exchange, Mr. Cuomo agreed to add $250 million — a modest amount by Albany standards — to his executive budget proposal, including more money for schools, the blind and the deaf, human services, higher education, and prescription drugs for the elderly. 

So it's actually not quite as bad as Cuomo first proposed, and this is coming from a Democrat.  That's the best thing you can say about the state's budget.  Keeping the surcharge on finance tycoons would have made up for the end of stimulus dollars from Washington, but the former state AG who ran on cleaning up Wall Street is now helping the fat cats clean out the state's treasury.  They get tax cuts, the rest of the state gets spending cuts.

Even the Democrats look like Republicans in 2011.  The battle over budget austerity has long been lost by the American people, and in state after state taxes on the wealthy are being chopped to fight over what few corporate jobs these multinationals are creating in the US...corporations sitting on record profits, mind you, screaming that they need tax relief or else, playing states against each other in order to get the best set of incentives.  Meanwhile, state taxpayers are picking up the bill and taking the financial pain.

Of course, what did you expect from the Wall Street State?