Is Gov. Paterson Chicken Little or Cassandra?

Our editorial cartoonist, Marquil, had a great bit the other day showing state Sen. Betty Little as Chicken Little — with a big economy-sized acorn about to crash on her head.

“We don’t need to cut spending now,” Little is saying. “Really. It’s not like the sky is falling.”

But really, the question we’re all waiting to answer is whether Governor David Paterson is chicken little — or Cassandra.

Remember her? She was the oracle cursed to know the future and be ignored. Because people blew off her prophecies, her city of Troy was crushed by the Greek invaders.

Paterson found himself ignored in Albany this week, his calls for swift and decisive action shelved by a quibbling legislature after a wave of opposition from unions, public employees, and other interest groups.

It’s the same old game that has shaped Albany politics for decades. And those rules of engagement filter all the way down to local government and local school districts.

This week, NCPR reported on the town of Malone’s heavy dependence on Albany spending. There seems to be very little effort underway to reduce that reliance.

A couple of days after that story aired, my son Nicholas trundled off to school in Saranac Lake — for a two-hour day. The vast expenditure of salaries and fuel costs needed to rev up an entire school district…squandered.

The kids barely had time to get off the buses and get their winter coats off before they were suiting up and heading back out again.

A day or so after that, the Saranac Lake district announced that it had locked in multi-year pay raises for their teachers — increases that locals will look to Albany to pay for.

There’s nothing new here. This all fits the long-standing pattern, established when Wall Street was generating tax revenues so copious that state officials couldn’t figure out how to spend it all.

(Okay, they did in the end figure out a way to spend it all.)

But if Paterson is right, the fundamental rules have changed. The well is dry. The state is so deeply in debt that our collective community is approaching junk-bond status.

Unless the economy pulls a stunning U-turn — and Wall Street hires back tens of thousands of workers — then the old habits, the old dependencies, the old expectations, will need to be re-examined.

Fast.

Unless the Governor is sorely mistaken, every month that we dither will make the needed cuts that much more painful.

We should know more by January when lawmakers return to Albany. For all our sakes, I hope Paterson really is Chicken Little.