We, the people?

It’s a full-scale p*&*ing match! - New York Politics Capitol Confidential - Albany Times Union - timesunion.com

The meeting is now wrapping up with with Paterson conceding that “this special session here on Nov. 18 will not yield the result that we want today.”

Who is we?

I am just curious here...

If we means Gov. Paterson and Sen. Smith and Speaker Silver, well...I guess not.

Sen. Skelos wants something different too.

And, really, who knows what Jim Tedisco really wants?

If we means the voters (and it never means the voters), well...most of us don't want the cuts to health care and education that Gov. Paterson wants. (Siena College Research Center via The Albany Project)

We can't all agree on a way to fix the broken New York, and it is broken, but a plurality of us agree that health care and education need to stay fully funded. Why? Education is the foundation of our society, and without (the barely adequate) funding that we have now, we are doing an incredible disservice to this generation.

As to health care, well, as we are all losing our jobs and benefits with the onset of this *cough* depression *cough*, wouldn't you like to know that your local hospital is fully funded (and that there is a safety net for those wonderful bills) when the next great pandemic hits (come along with me on this one, please?) or would you prefer that education and health care get cut so that we simply aren't prepared for the new world?

One of the problems that New Yorkers face, aside from entrenched interests (like the health care lobbies and the teachers' unions {I am aware of the irony here}) and institutional malaise (nothing gets done because nothing can get done) is that the leadership has all come out of the legislative body. I am not saying that our experiment with a State Executive without legislative experience *cough* Client #9 *cough* did us any good, but that was mostly because he was a megalomaniac, and not because of the way the system is set-up.

So, we, the people, deserve better, and we deserve a budget that is not so draconian to hurt the most vulnerable.

Or don't you care about the us that make up the we, Gov. Paterson?