I have to admit, I’m having a problem understanding how, in just 33 working days, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team was able to recommend 79 cost cutting measures to save $2.3 billion in the upcoming budget. I’ll address this concern from three viewpoints. 
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My last column, “Stop playing games with the budget deficit” (Feb. 3) was written one week before New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli issued his analysis of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive budget draft. The irrationality I outlined fell short of anticipating the following mea-culpa expressed in the comptroller’s analysis. “The SFY 2010-2011 enacted budget relied on $16.7 billion in non-recurring or temporary budget resources; and overly optimistic tax revenue projections, causing a dramatically worsened state structural deficit.” How dramatic? These tenuous entries constituted 30 percent of all the monies in the state’s operating fund. more

Bellmore-Merrick area school administrators said this week that, yes, their districts could cover proposed state aid cuts with their unrestricted reserve funds and federal stimulus dollars, as proposed recently by Governor Cuomo. But, they quickly noted, doing so could leave them with little to no cash on hand for emergencies, and even jeopardize the districts’ long-term fiscal health. more

With the inauguration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Saturday, New York state officially ended its brief but disastrous Spitzer era. Eliot Spitzer, the former attorney general, was elected governor in 2006 in a landslide and then entered office not to make friends in Albany, not even to govern, but to rule the land. He crashed and burned in one of the country’s most notorious sex scandals, after which he resigned and Lt. Gov. David Paterson assumed the state’s reins. more