Skelos To Paterson: Get Your Facts Straight
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- August
- 25
So much for the bi-partisan spirit that permeated the Capitol last week.
Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, R-Nassau County, put out a statement today that tries to remind Gov. Paterson that it wasn’t Senate Republicans who stood in the way of further budget cuts last week.
Liz Benjamin reports that Paterson heaped praise on Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver last night at the Democratic Convention, telling New York delegates that “I want everyone to know that though I asked for $600 million in cuts, Speaker Silver, along with his staff…brought up $850 million in cuts that could have taken us further than we were, and the only thing that stood between us and those reductions was the New York State Senate.”
But Skelos (right, in center, with Sens. Thomas Libous and Betty Little last week) rejected that description:
“At this time, the Governor would do well to heed the advice of one of the leading voices of his party over the last generation, the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who famously observed: ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’”
“The facts are these: the Assembly had no list of real spending reductions that would have allowed us to achieve additional savings and further strengthen the State’s finances. If they do have such a list, the Governor should make it public immediately.”
Instead, the Assembly partnered with the Governor to propose new revenue by increasing taxes on car, life and health insurance plans across the State and increasing the gross receipts tax on hospitals—leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in new taxes.”
This entry was posted
on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 3:08 pm by Joseph Spector.
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