From The New York Times:
Without a budget deal, New York will be left with just $36 million in the bank by the end of December, according to current projections. And the money will last that long, officials say, only if the state chooses to fully exhaust its emergency reserves by tapping several billion dollars’ worth of temporary loans from its rainy-day fund and short-term investments.
For weeks, Gov. David A. Paterson has invoked the shrinking amount of available cash in an effort to provoke the Legislature to deal with the state’s $3.2 billion budget deficit. So far, the specter of such dire fiscal outcomes has been greeted with what amount to legislative shrugs, chiefly in the recalcitrant State Senate.
The Times also notes that the state’s fiscal picture is at “considerable risk going forward” due to worsening credit ratings. And interestingly enough, in the same article the author writes:
But New York is by no means California, which has become the national measuring stick of statewide financial ruin. The state is not sending out i.o.u.’s to creditors, students at state schools are not holding sit-ins in dormitories, and Albany, unlike Sacramento, has not had to grapple with relocating a tent city for the homeless. … In modern times, the state’s general fund has never had a negative balance, according to the state comptroller’s office. If New York does in fact run out of cash, it will have to delay paying some of its biggest bills. Chief among the bills the state will face in December are $1.6 billion in aid the state is supposed to pay school districts, $2.5 billion in property tax relief to individual homeowners, and $500 million in general aid meant to go to local governments.
In other words, New York may not be California yet — but wait a month. In the meantime, the state legislature is working on solutions like this one:
Senate Democrats, who have thus far refused to hold a vote to legalize same-sex marriage, have nonetheless floated the theory in negotiations that the state could expect to take in more than $50 million a year in new revenue from the legalization of same-sex marriage, from a combination of marriage license and tourism revenue.
So the legislature’s finally going to pull the trigger on same-sex marriage because it will raise revenue equivalent to .03 percent of the state’s annual budget? Way to think outside the box. Crisis averted!
