Budgets: The truth is going to hurt

Jerry Kremer

The coming birthday of George Washington brings to mind his pledge to always tell the truth. Washington, as you will recall, once confessed to cutting down the family cherry tree. In those days there was no Facebook or Twitter to spread the message about honesty, so it didn’t get very far.

Today, honesty comes in many forms. We expect our doctors to tell us the absolute truth about our health.We rely on our clergy members to speak frankly about the world around us. We have little faith in our sports figures, who more often than not lie about anything from injuries to steroids.

In the weeks and months ahead we will be getting an earful about the state of our government, and we’re not going to like it, because the truth hurts. Government is in a bad way, whether in Washington, Albany, City Hall or Mineola.

The reason the truth is so painful is because our public figures have gone out of their way to spare us any bad news. Some have done it just to get re-elected, and others have done it thinking the money would always be there.

The public loves tax cuts. They are said to stimulate business and help people feel good about their lives and in turn their politicians. Every tax cut starts out costing a certain amount of money, and when more people take advantage of them they start to cost even more. We generally have enough money in the treasury to pay for them at the beginning, but once they spiral out of control, our elected officials have been reluctant to take anything away.

But we have reached the day of reckoning, and there is no way of fudging the facts. The federal government is in deep trouble because it has wanted to be “Big Daddy,” providing citizens with everything they wanted or, in a lot of cases, never even asked for.

At the state level, the problem has been equally bad. New York’s governors have either given away the store or have given in to the Legislature and approved programs there was no money to pay for. When was the last time a governor vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses because the state was broke? Hugh Carey, in 1980, and Mario Cuomo, in 1986, were the only two.