Cuomo’s Slippery Slopes

Imagine you own a flower shop or hotel and business plunges. Would you expect the state to bail you out? Of course not. Yet that’s what Albany did last year for three upstate ski resorts facing losses because of warm weather.

Officials say the Olympic Regional Development Authority, which runs the Belleayre, Gore and Whiteface slopes, faced an “emergency” due to a 25 percent drop in visitors. So it had the MTA send it $5 million, which the agency owed the state.

That’s right: New York’s cash-strapped downstate transit authority rushed funds to an upstate economic-development authority to bail out ski resorts.

As one ex-gubernatorial aide reportedly put it, “They’re stealing from one bankrupt place to prop up another bankrupt place.”

OK, the resorts are owned by a public entity that regularly gets millions from Albany. But that hardly makes it better.

Created to manage the 1980 Winter Olym- pics facilities, ORDA now helps promote tourism and economic activity in the area. But either the resorts can stand on their own — or they can’t. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to bail them out. Ever.

Besides, why was the MTA involved? Yes, it owed the state. But it positively reeks to have funds bypass Albany and go straight from one authority to another. At the least, it looks like an effort to keep the bailout quiet. Why couldn’t the state, with its $163 billion budget, find its own $5 million in cash?

Most important, bailouts are a losing way to “boost” the economy, even if they do fit Gov. Cuomo’s standard approach. Heck, he gives film moguls $420 million a year in taxpayer funds and just spent $750 million for a solar-panel factory in Buffalo.

It’s a sucker’s game in the long run: Handouts drive up taxes — hurting all taxpayers, whether businesses or working stiffs.

These schemes aren’t saving New York, they’re killing it.