New York’s problem: too much good government

Tomorrow, NCPR will broadcast Governor David Paterson’s state of the state address live at 1pm.

If Mr. Paterson is straight with the public — as he has been in recent months — he’ll paint a pretty gloomy picture.

Even after sizable cuts in this fiscal year, New York state faces an $8 billion dollar deficit in 2010.

(To put that number in context, it’s enough money to hire roughly 80,000 school teachers. So you can see how painful the deficit-cutting effort will be.)

As we wait for the bad news, too many politicians and too many editorial pages are pretending that our problem is bad government.

The message goes something like this: If we only clean up the waste, get rid of the frivolous spending and fraud, we’ll be fine.

Cut through all that famous New York red tape and there will be plenty of money to go around.

Don’t believe it.

The problem we face isn’t that we have too much bad government. That would be easy. Our curse is that we have too much good government.

From mental health programs to nursing homes to public hospitals. From village police departments to fleets of snow plows to school teachers.

The overwhelming majority of our taxpayer dollars go to great causes, helping people, improving lives, and easing the struggles of our poorest, most vulnerable citizens.

The painful truth is, we’re about to have less of that goodness. Probably a lot less.

Which is why it’s important to have an honest discussion of where we go next.

Do we freeze the salaries of school teachers and local government workers, as one conservative group is proposing?

Do we scale back aid in our public schools for kids with special needs? Will some of our wonderful, small-scale school districts have to consolidate?

Will people living in far-flung rural areas have to make do with fewer services? A road plowed less often?

Will we all have to pay a little more in taxes?

My guess is that in the coming weeks a lot of politicians will try to dodge these questions.

They’ll try to make this crisis about upstate vs. downstate, Democrat vs. Republican, public worker and school teacher vs. taxpayer.

That’s a game that worked forever, in Albany and around the state. Screaming and pointing fingers was the only sure way to get a big slice of the pie.

The truth is, there was never enough to go around. Even in the good times we were living beyond our means, building debt.

But now the game’s up. The good government pie has suddenly gotten a lot smaller and we’re all going to have to take a skimpier piece. And we’ll probably pay a little more for the privilege.

Painful? Sure. But if we’re not honest with ourselves, it could still get a lot worse.