Gov. Kathy Hochul’s disdain for the taxpayers was proven once again when it was exposed that she paid consultants $2 million to help her write her last two State of the State speeches. This is distasteful on all levels, but let’s start at the top.
The state of the State of New York is horrendous. Because of Gov. Hochul and politicians who think it’s okay to pay a million dollars for a speech, New Yorkers suffer the highest taxes and fees of any state in the union; it is the most difficult in which to do business. Thanks to their policies, our communities are gripped by a crime wave. Our once-proud Empire State holds the distinction of having the most people bailing out to areas managed by leaders who actually care about their citizens.
Nowhere in Hochul’s latest million-dollar speech, titled “Achieving the New York Dream,” did she mention the unrelenting assault of illegal immigrants pouring into the state, many of whom are being brought here in the middle of the night by the Biden Administration. Yet, she has the audacity to budget hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to pay for their room and board, not to mention legal services, cell phones, and both K-12 and higher education.
Even worse, Hochul did little in her speeches to assure taxpayers that she has any intention of reducing taxes or the cost of living. Everything was spend, spend, spend for a bureaucracy that the vast majority of residents couldn’t even tell you what it actually does for them. And not just spend, Hochul tried to take the zoning powers away from local governments so she can shoe-horn in multi-family developments anywhere she pleases. Those of us living in the suburbs certainly don’t share the governor’s vision of creating Brooklyn or the Bronx here in Suffolk.
What Hochul did do was double down on a Green Agenda that will cripple the state’s economy and drive the rest of the people who aren’t already on the dole, out of here as fast as they can go. Her new budget bans all fossil fuels in a few short years, and even the gas stoves in our homes, without even the slightest conception of the economic chaos this will cause.
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| New York State Governor Kathy Hochul |
Hochul has an enormous staff costing the taxpayers millions. You would think she could have taken a lesson from her former boss, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who used state workers to write the self-aggrandizing book about his COVID response. We’re sure there’s somebody around that could have helped her with her speeches. Makes you wonder how much her high-priced consultants kicked back to her election campaign.
Hochul just came out of the back room with an astounding $229.8 billion budget deal that does little to correct the deeply imbedded problems that make New York such an expensive place to live. Perhaps it will take another million dollar speech to convince us that everything’s fine.