NYS Comptroller Tom DiNapoli

Add State Comptroller to the very very long list of people who think the budget agreed to by Albany’s “3 men in a room” sucks. In fact, other than the three men in the room (Governor David Paterson, Senate Majority ‘Leader’ Malcolm Smith, and Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver) and their respective lackeys, the list includes pretty much everybody.

Here’s what Comptroller DiNapoli — himself a former Assembly member who then-Governor Spitzer feared would go too easy on the Albany power trio — has to say:

New York faced an extraordinary challenge to adopt a 2009-10 State Budget in the context of a daunting recession. My preliminary review of the budget indicates it does not adequately respond to today’s economic realities.

The budget is not a long-term solution to New York’s propensity to spend more than the state can afford. While the budget proposes to close an unprecedented gap, it does so by an over reliance on non-recurring federal stimulus funds and new tax revenues projected to materialize at a time of declining tax receipts.

This is essentially a buy-time budget, based on a hope that the economy recovers quickly. It’s a very fragile basket to place all the taxpayers’ eggs in. Instead of using the Federal stimulus to restructure the financial plan and match projected revenues to long term growth in spending, the budget uses stimulus funds as a short-term fix.

The danger is that New York could end up right back where we started, with huge budget gaps and an unsustainable level of spending. I will provide a more detailed review of the enacted budget shortly.

But of course all that matters to the statehouse wrecking crew is, whom if anyone will voters take their anger out on? Since voters almost universally reelect their local legislators who then pick the Senate Leader and the Speaker, Governor Paterson ought to be very worried. He’s the only guy voters can take it out on directly.

New York Gov. William Sulzer in 1913

The latest Get Real video is a history lesson that Albany’s Democrats seem never to have learned. Turns out their self-destructive behavior now is eerily similar to what happened in 1913 — the last year (other than one year during the Depression) that the party controlled all three levers of power in state government. Could they be sowing the seeds of their own destruction again?

Get Real: Dem History Forgotten from Jay DeDapper on Vimeo.

Gov. David Paterson

And you thought the stock market was having a rough year…. This morning’s Marist Poll piles on to the downward trend Governor Paterson has seen in two recent surveys from other polling organizations and shows his position to be getting worse by the week. Here’s the most damning line from the folks up in Poughkeepsie:

Governor Paterson’s approval rating is the lowest approval rating a New York State governor has received in the Marist Poll’s nearly thirty year history of statewide surveys.

Ouch. Paterson’s approval rating is down to 26% — five weeks ago Marist showed it at 46%. By way of c0mparison Spitzer’s and Pataki’s low-water marks were both 30%.

The problems for Paterson are total: Democrats give him only a 30% approval and would much prefer Andrew Cuomo to run for Governor in 2010 (62%-26%). Independents are even tougher on him than Republicans — just 20% of non-affiliated voters think Paterson’s doing a good job versus 26% of Republicans who think he is.

Dig in a little deeper and you find voters basically like David Paterson the man (77% say he’s working hard, 50% says he cares about people) but don’t much care for David Paterson the Governor (53% don’t think he’s a very good leader, 59% think he’s not doing a good job on the budget).

The election is still a long way off and the economy will clearly dictate much of what voters are feeling by then but as Get Real has pointed out over the last two months, Paterson’s only hope is that prominent African-American politicians stick with him, thereby making a Cuomo run difficult (here’s a previous post about that).

If Paterson’s polling problems don’t begin to go away, it’s going to be very hard for the Rangels and Sharptons of the world to stand by and NOT make a move.

IBO Director Ronnie Lowenstein (NY Times)

Mea Culpa! Apparently after all those years of a President who couldn’t think of a single mistake he’d made and corporate executives who couldn’t find a failure they wouldn’t reward, mea culpa’s are back.

Earlier this week New York City’s Independent Budget Office released it’s annual “how we would fix this screwy city budget if we could” report (Budget Options for New York City). It contained dozens of ideas for how the city could save hundreds of millions by changing some big and small things about the way the city does business.

One of those ideas involved cutting the city’s contribution to the pension plan for workers at “private cultural institutions” which sounded like a pretty good idea. After all why should the curator at the Met have a taxpayer-funded pension? The IBO estimated changing that policy would save about $25 million a year.

But they goofed. And Thursday they admitted it:

“In IBO’s ‘Budget Options for New York City’ released yesterday, we presented an option entitled Eliminate Pension Payments for Employees of Private Cultural Institutions (page 27). We estimated that this action would save $25 million annually. In fact, the Cultural Institutions Retirement System also includes employees of dozens of child care centers in the city. While the city’s payment to the Cultural Institutions Retirement System will be about $25 million this fiscal year, $17 million will be for the pensions of child care workers. That means the savings from eliminating the city’s pension contribution for cultural institution employees would be $8 million.”

Kudos to the IBO for fessing up and doing so pretty fast.

Plus even $8 million bucks is something. Mayor B? Whaddya think?

Oh, and one more. MSNBC host Keith Olbermann did his own mea culpa too. This one over his gleeful reporting about that the boss of arch-rival Fox News allegedly told analysts on a conference call earlier in the week.

The original transcript showed News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch saying his has ”never been a company that tolerates facts.” That of course was too delicious for Olbermann to pass up. Unfortunately it turned out the transcript was wrong.

To his credit Olbermann admitted he’d screwed up — or at least that the transcript company had screwed up and he’d repeated their error.

Hey. It’s something.