Super Mario - performance of New York Governor Mario Cuomo - Cover Story

National Review, Oct 10, 1994 by Richard Brookhiser

Even so, Cuomo manages to make ends meet only because much of the state's fiscal activity occurs off budget. The state imposes programs on localities through unfunded mandates, which they pay for by sales or property taxes - with the result that New York's combined state and local tax burden is the highest in the nation. Cuomo has also resorted to financial gimmicks to balance the budget: raiding insurance and retirement funds; "selling" state properties to public authorities; converting short-term debt into long-term bonds.

These policies have hovered over the state's private sector like a Canadian low-pressure system. The refugees from New York's business climate have made the coast of Connecticut and the swamps of New Jersey bloom. The outflow would have been even worse if Cuomo's flanks had not been protected, for most of the Bush recession, by a pair of fellow tax kamikazes, New Jersey Governor Jim Florio and Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker. But even this security is being torn from him.

The problem goes well beyond dollars and cents. Cuomo's impulse to shovel money at the state's problems has prevented him from thinking about them in any creative way. While other governors have experimented with education or welfare reforms, Cuomo has talked around the subjects and done nothing. His discussion of school choice in The New York Idea, a flat and feeble campaign book assembled for him by two state employees, is typical. "Are non-public schools prepared to accept all state regulations and court decisions?" he asks. Such a system would require "a new state-level bureaucracy . . . to oversee how local tax dollars are spent, to monitor accountability and performance." In other words, we can try something new, so long as it's exactly like what we already have. What New York already has in education is a per-pupil expenditure of $9,665, versus a national average of $6,932 - along with a high-school graduation rate that is 45th in the nation.

The best defense of Cuomo's record, though he is unlikely to make it, is that his approach to government differs little from that of his predecessors or his peers. Cuomo did not invent the modern welfare state in New York. That was the creation of Nelson Rockefeller, who dug the foundations in 1958, before the New Frontier was thought of, and who was putting up additions until 1974, long after the Great Society had ended. Cuomo has not maintained it without help. On all but a few issues, he has proceeded with the cooperation of the permanent majorities in both houses of the state legislature - Democrats in the Assembly, Republicans in the Senate.

On occasion, the legislature has forced him to cut the income-tax rate. On many occasions, it has tried to force him to reinstitute capital punishment, without success: he has vetoed every death-penalty bill the legislature has passed. (When it is a question of executing murderers, the Catholic office-holder discovers a stubbornness he believes it is improper to show in defense of fetuses.) But in every other area of government, Cuomo and the lesser powers that be - legislators, constituency groups, pundits - uphold the consensus that has governed the Empire State for almost four decades. They hold each other up like drunks in the street. If Cuomo beats George Pataki, it will be because Pataki failed to make a convincing case that he was not cut from the same cloth. Since Pataki is a protege of Senator D'Amato, this is a difficult case to make.