The New York State Budget is a Failure
Ricky Silver and Shannon Stagman
Yesterday afternoon, the New York State Senate caved to weeks of pressure from Governor Andrew Cuomo, passing a budget that made cuts to Medicaid, underfunded our schools, and rolled back crucial reforms on bail and discovery processes that were successfully curbing pre-trial detention. The State Assembly followed soon after, passing the same bill in the early-morning hours while New Yorkers slept. In the midst of a global pandemic, in which our state has been the epicenter of a virus that does not discriminate, our elected leadership in Albany chose to pass a budget that does.
For a decade, Governor Cuomo has balanced the state’s budgets on the backs of poor, black, and brown New Yorkers, systematically enabling our state’s crippling inequality. So it should come as no surprise that the governor kept his budget priorities focused on principles of austerity and abandonment of the most marginalized, while steadfastly refusing to support wealth taxes that would raise revenue and eliminate the necessity for further cuts to our already failing social safety net. While a pandemic ravages our communities, the governor refused to provide desperately needed support to renters, New Yorkers experiencing homelessness or food pantries—but he found time to include a provision intended to threaten the Working Families Party for having the audacity to run a candidate against him.
How can it be that a budget this wrongheaded, shortsighted, and downright petty passed, especially when all three branches of New York’s state government are controlled by Democrats? While we have come to expect from Governor Cuomo austerity and prioritization of the donor class over the marginalized, it is the failure of our Democratic majorities in both the New York State Senate and Assembly that angers us most. Groups like ours, Empire State Indivisible, worked tirelessly to help elect more and better Democrats to counterbalance a governor who for years enabled the Republican Party’s control of the state Senate. In 2018, voters across the state were mobilized by the hope that delivering a progressive Democratic majority in the state Senate would help forge a new path in Albany to create a more just and equitable New York. A path that prioritized transparency over backroom deals. A path that prioritized democracy over corruption. And a path that prioritized the most vulnerable New Yorkers over the wealthiest.
By those standards, this budget is a complete and utter failure. Leaders in both chambers failed to leverage the activism and organizing that made new revenue drivers feasible and incredibly popular with the voting electorate, instead of capitulating to devastating cuts. Legislators failed to organize their own colleagues to unite for an alternative vision to the governor’s atrocious priorities. They chose to work behind closed doors, voting out of the public view and even refusing to release one-house budgets, which makes it nearly impossible for their constituents to hold them accountable. Most importantly, in this time of fear and uncertainty, when many of us are trying to figure out how we’re going to survive and recover from this pandemic, they failed to show us New Yorkers that they have our backs.
Such fundamental abdication of responsibility undercuts their own protests that this isn’t the budget they wanted. If state legislators were committed to delivering real help to struggling New Yorkers in the midst of this pandemic—i.e., rent relief, increased funding to essential services, reductions in mass incarceration—then they would have fought hard against this budget, and held the line when it came time to vote. But in the end, there was no visible, coordinated resistance, and only a handful of brave legislators voted against it. As the people of our state continue to battle coronavirus, loss of income, and increased instability, we’re left wondering where our progressive champions have gone, and why we fought so hard to put them in power in the first place.
Thank you to the Democratic State Senators and Assembly Members who stood up to this budget:
Senators: Biaggi, Myrie, Ramos, Rivera, Salazar
Assembly Members: Barron, Blake, Carroll, Cruz, De la Rosa, Epstein, Niou, Fernandez, Kim, Miller, Niou, Quart, Reyes, Rosenthal, Simon, Simotas, Walker, Wright
Ricky Silver and Shannon Stagman are co-lead organizers of Empire State Indivisible. You can follow them on Twitter: @es_indivisible and @TheStagmania.