‘Blowing Up the Bathtub’

In regard to Jacob Gershman’s commentary on Governor Spitzer’s “humbling” first budget in which he claimed that Governor Pataki’s first budget had planted “the seeds of bad policy that would spread like weeds over those next 11 years,” I was a deputy tax commissioner during the first year of the Pataki administration and was involved in organizing the transition team that developed his first budget [Oped, “Blowing Up the Bathtub,” April 2, 2007].

The policy errors of Mr. Pataki’s latter years in office should not be allowed to obscure the accomplishments of his first term. In holding real spending growth to zero through his first three years in office, Mr. Pataki minimized or eliminated the worst fiscal abuses of the Cuomo era, including excessive reliance on one-shot revenues and other gimmicks.

The Republican governor’s first-term revenue estimates consistently proved to be conservative. True, the budget was adopted weeks or even months after the April 1 start of the fiscal year. But that’s because Mr. Pataki actually put into practice Mr. Spitzer’s mid-March observation that the right budget was much more important than an ontime budget.

Too bad Mr. Spitzer didn’t show similar fortitude as the clock was ticking down to a meaningless April 1 “deadline.” Mr. Pataki’s first budget may not have been a “gold” standard, but it set a standard for any governor who really means to shake up Albany.

EDMUND McMAHON Director Empire Center for New York State Policy Albany, N.Y.

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