Albany Republicans, the minority in the state Senate and Assembly for the last seven years, face a long hike back to political relevance.
They can start by answering the $20 billion question.
That’s the difference between what New York state expects to spend this fiscal year — $148 billion, excluding federal aid and borrowing — and what it would be spending if the last budget enacted with GOP support, in 2018, had kept growing only at the rate of inflation.
That amount is $128 billion.
Republicans correctly note state spending is higher than ever — and, given Albany’s reliance on a small subset of high earners, rising unsustainably.
But they can’t put the blame on the Democrats alone.
The $20 billion question isn’t about what Republicans would cut if voters again entrusted them to steer the state.
It’s a deeper challenge: It asks them to explain, to themselves especially, how they can credibly claim to be the taxpayers’ champions when they not only supported much of this fiscal bulge, but pushed to make it worse.
Most of the budget growth since 2018 has been in just two programs: Medicaid and school aid.
Republicans supposedly concerned about the state’s fiscal picture have repeatedly agitated for higher spending on both.
New York spends $4,942 per resident (enrolled or not) on Medicaid, per Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. That’s 23% more than the next-highest state, Kentucky, and double what New Jersey spends.
A credible opposition party would be hammering Gov. Kathy Hochul on this, arguing that the program is pushing up taxes, crowding out essential services and often failing the vulnerable people it’s meant to help.
But the tiny group of upstate fiscal hawks making these points are undercut by their own Republican team: Sen. Pat Gallivan, ostensibly his conference’s health care point man, last year joined 1199 SEIU, the state’s largest health care union, to demand “Medicaid equity,” a budget-busting increase in what the state pays hospitals and other providers.
New York’s GOP can’t even credibly levy its evergreen complaint about “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid.
The Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, a once-tiny initiative meant to help a small group of people live outside nursing homes, mushroomed into a $9 billion boondoggle that pays more than 400,000 people to care for 250,000 New Yorkers.
Republicans should have been first to sound the alarm on CDPAP — yet when Hochul proposed modest reforms by eliminating middlemen, they called her suggestion a “full-blown catastrophe” and all but ignored the fiscal hemorrhaging.
Hellbound and Down 