The Budget NY Needs

Wouldn’t it be nice if the next state budget focused on handling New York’s worst problems? Things like the migrant wave, subway violence, mental illness, a housing crunch, soaring electric bills, the plague illegal pots shops, a teetering school system . . .

We’ve written about the priorities of Gov. Hochul and the drunken-sailor legislators who want to spend $246 billion — more than the entire economy of Greece.

But making New York better would require a dramatically different approach:

For starters: Slash taxes. Drastically. The Empire State’s highest-in-America tax burden has fueled a rush to the exits: From July 2020 to July 2023 alone, more than half a million left New York for greener pastures.

That exodus has coincided with neverending tax hikes, starting with a “temporary” steep new tax on New York’s highearners under Gov. David Paterson in 2009 that’s since been largely renewed and deepened, with the top rate now at 10.9%, up from 6.85%.

This, when the cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes (a k a SALT) means the state income tax hits far harder than it used to.

And now progressives are pushing for still another $2.2 billion hike this year, with a top rate at 11.4%.

No way: To hang on to the top earners who form a huge part of the tax base, New York needs to get back to the pre-Paterson top rate — or less.

Next: Repeal every recent criminaljustice “reform.”

Albany’s rammed through several round of these since 2017: Raise the Age, cashless bail, tough new rules for prosecutors — and it’s all led to more crime: Major felonies in the city were up 32% last year over 2018.

Reverse or at least repair every one of those “reforms” — and get the MTA the cash for more cops in the subway.

Give the mayor permanent control of city schools. Quit toying with ending mayoral control (and quietly limiting it); there’s no reason only New York City parents should face endless uncertainty over how their system gets run.

Boost charter schools.

Charters have been the best hope for poor, minority kids desperate to escape their failing city-run schools but unable to afford private ones.

Lawmakers need to defy the teachers union, which hates the competition, lift the cap on the charters and give them as much per-pupil funding as other public schools.

Help mentally ill New Yorkers and get violent ones off the streets.

New Yorkers are sick of looking over their shoulders for dangerous crazies and stepping over drug-addled or mentally ailing bodies on sidewalks. And these sick people deserve care.

The state needs to provide way more psychiatric beds — and make it easier to commit those who are violent.

Crack down on illegal pot shops. New York’s legalization of weed sales has been a disaster: Create a workable system for licensing accountable, tax-collecting pot shops and empower local officials to shut down the criminal ones.

Repeal the 2019 rent “reforms” and restore the affordable-housing tax incentive. The state should phase out rent control entirely, but it needs to at least get the city’s housing market out of cardiac arrest.

The 2019 changes made it impossible for landlords to afford fixes, leading them to warehouse apartments they can’t afford to bring up to code.

And progressives killed the 421(a) tax break that had fostered most new lower-income housing construction; until something like it returns, builders will focus only on projects that serve high earners. Repeal congestion pricing.

This punitive, ineffective scheme won’t relieve traffic or slow climate change but merely slam everyday workers.

If the MTA needs money, let the state find it elsewhere.

Scrap, fix or delay the green-agenda madness. As the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin notes, the true costs of New York’s 2019 climate law are off the charts: between $600 billion and $1 trillion. All paid for by New Yorkers, mainly via hidden charges on utility bills.

And it puts New York’s electrical supplies at grave risk.

Take over the migrant crisis from the city.

The consent decree forcing Gotham to provide shelter for every person who seeks it supposedly stems from the state Constitution. So why isn’t the state picking up the tab?

Some of these ideas mean more state spending, but the cash can come from ending outlays New York doesn’t remotely need, including its billions in “economic development” waste and inane special-interest tax breaks — $700 million a year for the film and TV biz alone.

Taxpayers could also save a ton from trimming back New York’s Medicaid benefits, which vastly exceed the national average.

Heck, ending prevailing-wage laws would cut 20% off the cost of capital projects.

Yes, these ideas are the stuff of nightmare for the folks who run New York, but that’s because they’re running it for themselves, not the public at large.