Advice for Governor's TV Speech
July 29th, 2008
Governor David Paterson has scheduled a TV address for 5:10 p.m. on Tuesday to talk about the looming fiscal crisis facing the state – and he is getting plenty of advice on what to say.
The New York Post says that “Gov. Paterson has a big chance, in his televised address tonight, to prove that his repeated warnings about the state’s fiscal woes haven’t been just . . . talk.”
The Daily News calls for “decisive action that cures Albany’s addiction to overtaxing and overspending without regard for reality.”
Columnist Bill Hammond tells Paterson to “channel his inner George Pataki” and talk about the need for tax cuts, as well as spending cuts.
State Senator Diane Savion suggests the line “we’ve run out of monopoly money.”
By Mark Berkey-Gerard on July 29, 2008, 10:42 amIn category: Albany, Economy, Public Finance | 1 Comment »

July 30th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
As goes the NY budget, so goes the national budget. Last year, we spent $133 Billion on the Iraq war. If our elected officials had been investing in our economy here at home, we could have paid for: health care for 3,920,9905 people for one year, Head Start for 18,251,681 students for one year; and we could have powered 137,823,834 homes with renewable electricity for one year.
To bring this information home to all Americans, Progressive Future has built an online tool called the Invest in US Calculator. The calculator takes a person’s 2007 income before taxes and tells you how much of that person’s tax money went to fund the war (average: $235), and how many seconds of war that bought (average: .04 seconds). Then it tells you, with that money, how many days of health coverage that could pay for (average: 25), how many days of Head Start education (average: 12), how many days of heating a home with renewable energy (average: 78), and how many days of veterans’ higher education benefits (average: 5) that money could have paid for. Then we are asking users to sign our Invest In US petition, which we plan on taking to Congress, the Platform Committees, and the media to push for new priorities for tax spending.
http://progressivefuture.org/invest-in-us-calculator?id4=BLGG