{"id":280,"date":"2008-11-21T10:26:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T14:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2008\/11\/21\/is-gov-paterson-chicken-little-or-cassandra\/"},"modified":"2008-11-21T10:26:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-21T14:26:00","slug":"is-gov-paterson-chicken-little-or-cassandra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2008\/11\/21\/is-gov-paterson-chicken-little-or-cassandra\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Gov. Paterson Chicken Little or Cassandra?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

But really, the question we’re all waiting to answer is whether Governor David Paterson is chicken little — or Cassandra.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(Okay, they did in the end figure out a way to spend it all.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Fast.<\/p>\n

Unless the Governor is sorely mistaken, every month that we dither will make the needed cuts that much more painful.<\/p>\n

We should know more by January when lawmakers return to Albany. For all our sakes, I hope Paterson really is Chicken Little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our editorial cartoonist, Marquil, had a great bit the other day showing state Sen. Betty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}