O’Mara: ‘Spend, spend, spend’ remains the focus of Hochul's massive budget plan

Albany, N.Y., January 16-—State Senator Tom O’Mara (R,C-Big Flats), Ranking Member on the Senate Finance Committee, today said that Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed 2024-2025 state budget calls for another record-breaking, $233-billion state spending plan that “downplays the fiscal realities facing this state, ignores the burdens being shouldered by middle-class taxpayers, and refuses to take the steps needed to address affordability.” 

O’Mara said, “It remains mind boggling. This state already faces multi-billion-dollar deficits far into the future because the Albany Democrats can’t stop spending and Governor Hochul still proposes a spend, spend, spend strategy. The Albany Democrat appetite for spending over the past several years has been a one-party smorgasbord gobbling up billions of taxpayer dollars. It’s been uncontrolled spending to the point that having put in place massive, long-term spending commitments -- and with massive commitments looming in the Democrats’ pursuit of a radical climate agenda and the provision of untold services to an ever-surging migrant population -- New York State taxpayers already face multi-year, multi-billion-dollar deficits. It ignores the reality that New York remains one of America’s highest-taxed, least- affordable, most debt-ridden, and overregulated states that leads the nation in population loss. There’s nothing in this plan that seriously addresses the need for lower taxes across the board, less regulation, debt reduction, mandate relief, or any of the other strangleholds on state and local taxpayers, small businesses and manufacturers, and continually hard-pressed upstate communities, economies, and workers.”

Like he did following Hochul’s State of the State message last week, O’Mara warned that the state’s Democrat leaders, like they have for the past several years while increasing state spending by nearly $60 billion, are once again eyeing even more long-term commitments for higher spending. Last year’s final $229-billion spending plan left New York with the nation’s second-highest state budget, behind only California. 

O’Mara predicted that Hochul and the Democrat-controlled Senate and Assembly will enact a final budget that significantly increases New York’s spending again this year – including a starting point of an additional $2 billion to address a surging migrant crisis statewide -- and leave state and local taxpayers shouldering a long-term, unsustainable burden. 

He stressed that the governor’s proposed executive budget already calls for increasing the current state budget by more than $4 billion even before final negotiations with the “biggest-spending Legislature in state history.”

The governor’s fiscal plan admits that the state continues to face multi-year, multi-billion-dollar budget deficits, including $5 billion next year, $5.2 billion the following year, and nearly $10 billion by 2027.

O’Mara said that joint Senate-Assembly budget hearings are scheduled to begin next week.