Archive: Opinions

At the most grass roots level there are no excuses in Lansing.  The Town, the Village, the fire district and the library don't make excuses.  They either hold the line on the tax rate or at least stay within the cost of living rises, and their tax rates are low, anyway.  Services don't seem to suffer.

But the taxing authorities we pay the most to do make excuses.  Putting aside the plummeting value of the largest taxpayer, the power plant, the school district complains that the state has cut their aid, and increased their mandates.  Tompkins County makes the same complaint.  The other day I listened to a State Assemblyperson complain that reductions in federal funding, which account for a third of the state's budget have put a crunch on New York.  All three tell us they have cut personnel, and are faced with cutting services.

I was surprised to hear that excuse in behalf of the state.  I am so used to the County and the Schools blaming the state that it seemed weird.  The state is supposed to be the budget bad guy.  Now it's claiming it is the victim of the federal government.

That leads me to wonder who the federal government can blame for its enormous deficit.  There must be someone.

I think it would be more satisfying to blame a true villain for our governments' budget woes.  If we could blame North Korea maybe it wouldn't feel so bad paying higher taxes.  Or Darth Vader.  Ol' Darth made the United States spend all that money it didn't have.  Blaming really bad guys is much more satisfying than blaming ourselves.

If the State is going to blame the feds for underfunding, I would expect some empathy in Albany.  In other words, I would expect a rush to eliminate all unfunded mandates and to fund the ones that legislators think are just so important that they can't trust localities to do on their own.  But school and county officials say despite so-called mandate reform in Albany unfunded mandates are becoming more onerous.

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a discussion on the school calendar and why so much training is needed to meet state reporting mandates.  A few days later our office received a mandatory census form asking us to report on how many billions of dollars our little company made last year, breaking it down according to this and that... I understand that a company that actually makes billions or millions can afford to pay someone to fill out such a form, but I spent a whole morning dealing with it, not doing the work I am supposed be doing to earn the not billions that we don't earn.

The Census Bureau wanted to make sure that I filled out the form, so they threatened me.  "Your response is required by law (Title 13, United States Code, Sections 182, 224, and 225)," their letter said.  You could interpret that to be simply informational, but I saw it as a threat that the Census Police would take me away in cuffs if I didn't send the form in.  I don't think our little two-bit company will matter one jot in their overall statistics, but their form mattered a lot in the productivity of our company this week.

To be real, we had unfunded mandates long before we had all these aid cuts.  They just hurt more now, which is another reason why the growing number of them is hard to understand.

Maybe our taxing authorities should stop blaming others and start balancing their budgets.  I know it's a novel idea, especially for governments, but what we have now is unsustainable.  My solution?  Make every legislator personally fill out a four inch pile of forms every month and don't give them a per diem or any kind of money to do it.  When bills for new mandates are being considered, make them fill out an eight inch pile of forms.  Yeah, that'll fix it.

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