Gov. Cuomo forgot the partridge in the pear tree.
But that’s about all that was missing in the bucket of boodle included in his something-for-everybody-but-the-taxpayer State of the State message — delivered with Cuomoesque exuberance in Albany Wednesday.
Some of it actually made sense.
Most of it was fantastical, seemingly predicated on an assumption that the private-sector money pump that lately has stuffed the state’s accounts full to bursting is a permanent fact of New York life. It isn’t.
A lot of the speech amounted to naked pandering, with a healthy ration of political mischief — plus full policy salvos aimed squarely at Mayor de Blasio.
Oh, and the governor proposed “ethics reform,” too — but only in passing and even then calling for nothing that hasn’t been on the table for years. Preet Bharara may have convicted Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos — but he clearly didn’t teach Albany any lasting lessons.
Cuomo half-heartedly called for superficial changes in the law that he has no reason to believe the Legislature will deliver. But he did it without acknowledging that “legal” can be one thing, “ethical” something else entirely.
Take his proposed $15-per-hour minimum wage, a 70-plus percent hike in the current standard.
The governor cast it as matter of economic justice, but he wisely opposed it in the past — before hearing from George Gresham of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union.
SEIU, an organization that long owned former Gov. Pataki, now holds a huge mortgage on the Cuomo administration — having provided critical support to his 2014 reelection campaign.
What Cuomo proposes — all the fancy rhetoric aside — is a functional business tax increase so severe that’ll cause job losses estimated at 200,000 on the low side to as many as 400,000 on the other end, the majority of them upstate.
Gresham’s members, most of them health-care workers, will benefit, of course — as will Gresham. But while the hike in medical bills will be substantial, the governor will have delivered. He may be a cynic, but he’s no ingrate.
Meanwhile the new minimum will be just that — forcing sharp wage hikes across the board throughout the private sector and thus substantially increasing the cost of doing business in New York. (No coincidence, of course, that General Electric on Wednesday rejected Cuomo’s request that it return its worldwide headquarters to the Empire State: It’s headed to Boston, including the offices it now has in the city.)
It took Cuomo more than an hour to deliver the speech; obviously, there was a whale of a lot packed into it.
This includes an infrastructure renewal program that is at once intriguing and fanciful — outlining worthwhile undertakings but attaching a $100 billion price tag to them. “This would make Gov. Rockefeller jealous,” said Cuomo — which no doubt is true, but which is cold comfort to those who remember the damage Rocky’s spendthrift policies did to New York’s economy.
That’s not to discount the value of investing in bridges, tunnels and so on. Cuomo revives an old chestnut, a $1.5-billion expansion of the Javits Convention Center — and while that cost estimate is decidedly on the modest side, it remains that the Far West Side construction boom and the 7 Train extension right to the Javits front door make expansion all but irresistible.
As for the rest — airports, bridges, tunnels and so on — well, you spend $20 billion here and $20 billion there and pretty soon you’re talking a real pipe dream. Nobody has the faintest notion where to find that kind of money.
On the Mayor de Blasio front, Cuomo proposes creating what amounts to a receivership program for localities whose homelessness policies don’t measure up to gubernatorial standards — guess where New York City’s will rank — and also accepted with a flourish former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s proposal to relieve the city of substantial responsibility for combating terrorism.
It’s hard to imagine de Blasio or current Commissioner Bill Bratton being pleased with either proposal — though who’s to doubt that Cuomo has much more in store for the both of them.
Then there was the miscellaneous patronage and pandering — including proposals to vastly expand the state’s set-asides for minority business enterprises and freeze tolls on the state Thruway until 2020. These will be popular politically, but they make no sense fiscally — and that’s OK with Cuomo, because what the hell, it’s only (taxpayer) money and there’s so much of it floating around these days.
Just not nearly enough to do it all. And there never will be.