Governor Paterson’s August Surprise

If New Yorkers want to know what happens when elected officials continually put off a day of budgetary reckoning, they need only take a glance across the Hudson River. New Jersey’s fiscal woes are becoming the stuff of legend—in a bad way. Decades of free spending, of casual borrowing, of routine disregard for the mismatch between revenues and expenditures have made the Garden State a fiscal basket case.

Governor David Paterson’s recent warning about New York’s deteriorating finances ought to make New Jerseyans just a little envious. After all, they didn’t learn about their state’s chronic mismanagement until property owners started getting hit with huge annual tax hikes. New York, by contrast, has a chief executive with the courage to speak unpleasant truths before matters get entirely out of hand.

Mr. Paterson’s recent speech about the state’s finances, his follow-up visit to Washington and his general sense of urgency ought to inspire action from lawmakers and voters alike. Unfortunately, the governor seems to be quite alone in his anxiety. Despite Mr. Paterson’s timely appeal for change in the status quo, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the new Senate majority leader, Dean Skelos—in his first test of leadership—seem inclined to wait and see if things really are as bad as the governor suggests.

The Legislature as a whole has a reason to put hard decisions on hold. The entire body is up for reelection in November (Mr. Paterson and other statewide officials are not), and emergency budget cutting is not necessarily considered a sure ticket to a new term.

Nevertheless, it is time that lawmakers realized that their responsibilities entail more than simply handing out taxpayer dollars to worthy local organizations and voting for exciting new programs designed to make them popular back home. The governor wants them back in Albany later this month, in the dog days of August, so they can approve $1.2 billion in cuts to a budget that has developed a $6.4 billion hole. Even in Albany, that’s serious money.

Lawmakers will howl, but that’s just too bad. Mr. Paterson is persuasive when he argues that the state simply cannot live with the foolish budget that former Governor Eliot Spitzer proposed earlier this year, and which the Legislature, its eyes firmly fixed on November, approved with glee. It’s true that technically the budget passed after Mr. Spitzer resigned and Mr. Paterson took his place, but the spending plan was very much a Spitzer administration document.

Mr. Paterson, in essence, is proposing a do-over. The current state budget was criticized at the time of its passage as overly generous. In the months since its passage, economic forecasts have only gotten worse. Another governor might well have engaged in some severe teeth gnashing but nothing more. Mr. Paterson has the fortitude to tell lawmakers that they simply have to rectify the situation before it gets even worse.

It may well be an exaggeration to summon memories of the bad old days of the 1970s, but anybody who remembers those days knows what a price New York paid for ignoring its fiscal excesses. Mr. Silver and Mr. Skelos are in the position to reverse the current course; voters take note.