The following appears in the January 31-February 6, 2014 issue of the Long Island Business News:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2014-15 is a classic election-year budget that attempts to be all things to every voting group in the state.

To appeal to fiscal conservatives he’s proposed keeping spending increases under the rate of inflation, at about 2 percent. He’s also claiming that the success of his policies will result in a $2 billion surplus that could fund some tax cuts and property tax credits for select homeowners.

What the governor failed to mention is that his so-called “tax relief” is nothing more than income redistribution. That’s because he raised taxes on the rich – breaking his solemn pledge not to do so – and the $2.6 billion in revenue generated from the increases will be used to fund this so-called relief.

As for the governor’s boast that his outstanding stewardship of the state’s finances has turned a projected $3 billion deficit into a $2 billion surplus, experts are questioning his veracity.

After reviewing the governor’s proposed financial plan, E.J. McMahon, president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, said: “There is no $2 billion surplus, not really. Not by any traditional standard of measurement. In fact, if the executive budget is adopted as proposed, the state will still face a budget gap of $1.6 billion in 2006, $2 billion in 2017 and $3 billion in 2018.

“That ‘$2 billion budget surplus’ is, or was, strictly aspirational,” McMahon added. “Or a better word, notional. Or hypothetical. Or something other than actual, based on adoption of the actual budget proposed by the governor.”

To placate the extreme leftists who control the state’s Democratic Party, New York’s City Hall and the teachers’ union, Cuomo has vowed to fund universal full day pre-K, which is expected to cost $100 million next year and is projected to top $500 million annually by year five.

He has also proposed to put before the voters this November a $2 billion bond proposal. If approved, the money would be used to fund “the technology of tomorrow” for schools and to pay for the construction of pre-K classrooms.

The benefits of 4 year olds in full day pre-K programs are dubious at best. The political and practical reason for implementing the program: It creates thousands of new teaching positions, which further empowers teachers unions. New York City’s Mayor de Blasio has another motive for supporting pre-K: He can force charter schools, which he and the teachers union despise, out of city public school buildings, citing the need for space.

As for the $2 billion bond issue, incurring long-term debt to buy laptops and iPads – which have short life spans – is ludicrous. The Empire Center points out that the real motive for borrowing is “to cover expenditures heretofore subsidized out of the state’s annual operating budget in the form of school aid, including funds dedicated for building and ‘hardware and technology.’”

This is a classic fiscal gimmick perfected by the governor’s father, Mario Cuomo, whereby one issues long-term debt to pay for today’s operating expenditures. Such fiscal shell games brought New York City to the edge of bankruptcy in the 1970s.

Hopefully, the voters in November will have the good sense to reject this sop to the teacher unions.

Cuomo’s boast that he is “Building on Success” and that he has “reversed decades of decline and made dramatic and undeniable progress” appears to be falling on deaf ears. Between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013, New York lost 104,000 residents than it took in. The Empire State has the worst domestic migration record in the nation.

People are leaving economically depressed areas like Broome County, where Cuomo forbids hydrofracking, for fast-growing states like North Dakota, which have been experiencing a fracking-fueled boom.

Until Cuomo champions genuine tax cuts and promotes real job growth, expect New Yorkers to continue flocking to the exits.

The following op-ed piece I wrote appeared in Newsday on February 2, 2014.

The repeated claim by Port Authority bureaucrats over the years that the agency is removed from the political environment and exercises the best scientific management theories is nonsense.

Because the ultimate overseers of the bi-state agency created in 1921 are the governors of New York and New Jersey, the authority will always be managed by their political allies. However, that does not mean the authority’s practices and policies cannot be reformed or improved.

For several months, the Port Authority has been embroiled in scandal amid allegations that a top authority appointee of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie abused the power of his office to create traffic havoc on the George Washington Bridge to punish a political foe — and that Christie knew more than he has acknowledged. A federal investigation is underway, and a spotlight has been cast on the agency’s operations.

One glaring shortcoming at the agency that can be eliminated with the stroke of a pen is the Port Authority’s Regional Economic Development Program — also known by authority insiders as “The Bank.” Established along with the 1984 toll hike, The Bank funded some $400 million in pet projects on either side of the Hudson River.

This fund, which has been replenished after each toll hike, has been a reward to governors for not objecting to toll increases.

Abolishing the program would send a strong message that the governors are serious about reforming the agency.

The Port Authority lost its way in the 1980s and early 1990s when its mission was redefined as a regional economic engine instead of a brain trust for transportation policy. Authority officials, who did not understand market forces, funded countless economic initiatives that failed, including the Brooklyn Fishport fishing complex; industrial parks in Bathgate, Yonkers and Elizabeth; a World Trade Institute that included a language school; and a downtown hotel.

Fortunately, some of those economic projects were sold or closed during my tenure as executive director — and others the authority has been saddled with for decades are being unloaded. Its Essex County Resource Recovery Facility was sold last year; the Newark Legal Center is being sold; and the Teleport office park on Staten Island is on the market.

For the authority to get back on track, it must recommit to its core mission — transportation — and examine all its undertakings and projects to determine whether they are germane to the agency’s mission. Financial resources should be shifted from headquarters staff to line department operations — aviation, port commerce and transportation. And an aggressive capital program to overhaul its aging infrastructure should move ahead.

Some of this is already in the making: About $5 billion in investments have been committed to rehabilitating Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. More than $2.6 billion is being dedicated to fix the infrastructure of the George Washington and Bayonne bridges. And plans to build a new Goethals Bridge are underway.

If the Port Authority gets back to basics and efficiently meets the critical transportation needs of the region, the public will be the winner. But that will require two governors to stop using the agency as a bank to fund their pet projects.

George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority (1995-1997), is a director of the Nassau Interim Finance Authority.

The following appears in the January 17-23, 2014 issue of the Long Island Business News:

The inauguration of Bill de Blasio as New York’s 109th mayor was more a dump-fest on outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg than a leftist love-fest.

Sanitation Department Chaplain Fred Lucas, in his “prayer,” referred to the city Bloomberg had managed for 12 years as a “plantation.” Newly installed Public Advocate Letitia James accused Bloomberg’s policies of leaving many people voiceless.

Harry Belefonte, a wealthy entertainer who holds himself up as a social commentator, complained that Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policing policies resulted in a “community divided” and promised de Blasio would “fix our deeply Dickensian justice system.”

As for de Blasio’s inaugural address, former presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonon summed it up best: “What was absent in Mr. de Blasio’s remarks was a kind of civic courtesy or grace. The kind that seeks to unite and build from shared strength, the kind that doesn’t demonize. Instead, from our new mayor we got the snotty sound of ‘us vs. them,’ of zero sum politics.”

When asked about the Bloomberg dump-fest, de Blasio indicated he was not at all disturbed by any of the harsh comments.

“The individuals, the clerics who gave remarks … I respect each and every one of them and their right to say that which they feel is appropriate,” he said. “I am very comfortable with everyone’s remarks.”

The rude behavior of the inaugural event speakers and de Blasio’s reaction didn’t surprise me, because progressive politicians have historically been sore winners. These would-be “managers of the collective life” believe they are entitled to hold public office. They view themselves as exceptional persons and expect people to submit to their notions of the “good society.” For them, “government by the people” has been merely a slogan to humor the masses.

The nation’s leading progressive “sore winner” has been President Barack Obama. Shortly after taking office in 2009, the man who was to be a uniter and the post-partisan president abruptly shut down an exchange of ideas with Republican leaders by announcing, “I won the election.”

Political columnist Jed Bobbin concluded the central aspect of Obama’s bipartisanship scam is that opponents must “let him set the terms of the debate and adopt his theory of government in order to be ‘bipartisan’.”

And so it is with “progressive” Bill de Blasio.

During the campaign, he stated he wanted to raise city income taxes on the rich 1 percent to finance a universal pre-K school program. However, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed additional state aid to finance the program in lieu of raising taxes, de Blasio dismissed Cuomo’s approach. The mayor said he wanted to raise income taxes on everyone earning over $500,000 annually even if Albany paid for 100 percent of pre-K education. “We believe it’s the right thing to do,” he declared.

Instead of agreeing to a reasonable compromise, de Blasio sticks it to the governor because he is an anointed one who knows best and people should be submissive to his ideological vision of how the city should be managed.

Civility is not part of the progressive politicians’ creed. That’s why the noted historian Richard Hofstadter called them “totalitarian liberals” who employ illiberal means to achieve so-called liberal reforms. These authoritarians of the left, according to Hofstadter, often embrace “hatred as a form of creed” in pursuit of their goals.

De Blasio and friends set such a tone on Jan. 1. Expect them to impose their ideological formulas on New Yorkers regardless of the consequences – and don’t be surprised if they drive the city into the fiscal abyss, just as the progressives did last time they controlled City Hall, during the John Lindsay years.

The following appears in the January 3-9, 2014 issue of the Long Island Business News:

Governor Andrew Cuomo has created more commissions to examine controversial issues than any New York chief executive in recent decades.

His prime motive for employing this approach to governing: It gives the impression that “objective” outsiders have given a “seal of approval” to public policy plans the governor has already decided.

An example of such a wired report is the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption’s report released Dec. 2.

The Moreland Act, passed at the behest of Gov. Charles Evans Hughes in 1906, has had a rich history. It vests in the governor broad unilateral power to create an investigative commission – with authority to issue subpoenas and take testimony – to document corruption, fraud or wrongdoing by public figures.

In the 1970s, Gov. Hugh Carey empanelled Moreland Commissions that successfully investigated the operations of nursing home facilities and the Urban Development Corp., which had defaulted on tax-exempt bonded debt.

To ensure honest reports that detailed the ugly reality of a given scandal and made serious reform proposals, governors appointed panels of renowned “wise men” who were above partisan politics. This was not the case, however, in the Public Corruption Commission. Cuomo appointed a bunch of elected district attorneys from around the state – politicians who raise campaign money, mostly from fellow lawyers.

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, who has been serving as co-chairwoman of the commission, has proved why it was a bad decision to appoint elected officials. She was criticized on Dec. 18 by Nassau Democratic Chairman Jay Jacobs for not filing criminal witness-tampering or other election law charges against former Police Commissioner Thomas Dale and others involved with the campaigns of County Executive Edward Mangano and former Freeport Mayor Nassau Hardwick.

The essence of Jacobs’ complaint is that the DA’s decision was a political decision, not a sound legal one. He has demanded a federal investigation while other political wags have called for the Public Corruption Commission to investigate its own co-chair.

The preliminary commission report issued in early December summarizes the obvious: “An epidemic of public corruption has infected the state.” The commission boasts that it has performed “robust” and “aggressive” investigations utilizing a “leading investigative and risk analytics consulting firm to integrate vast datasets using a unique and versatile data analytics tool originally developed for use in the counter-terrorism context,” but it didn’t really turn up anything new or startling. And its panacea for eliminating corruption is, not surprisingly, identical to the governor’s position: public financing of campaigns, lower campaign contributions and limited campaign accounts.

Forcing taxpayers to pay for political campaigns is absurd. As New York City pols have proved, the introduction of publicly financed campaigns does not halt corruption.

Some city pols scam public financing rules, raising $6 in public money for or every $1 raised in small donations, generating tens of thousands of matching dollars – not to win an election, but to pay salaries of cronies and relatives on their campaign payrolls.

Politicians throughout New York have reached corrupt lows because of a warped definition of ethics.

Campaign finance reforms will not curtail public corruption. That end will require spiritual and cultural reforms that change the moral compass of many politicians.