Government Reform

Albany's culture of complacency with politics as usual creates an unusual burden for New Yorkers. A broken budgeting process, a perverse concentration of power among a small handful of elected officials, and a shrouded pork spending process that is patently undemocratic have all served to entrench a ruling class that appears largely indifferent to reform.

Specifically, hundreds of millions of dollars in annual secret spending, billions of dollars lost to unpoliced Medicaid fraud, untold hundreds of wasteful and unreliable public authorities, and undemocratic rules of procedure in the legislature are among the most dangerous and imminently curable problems that our state government insists on ignoring.

The lack of spending transparency and the entrenchment of power not only robs the people of their due authority, but also perpetuates a system ripe for fraud, waste, and abuse. As a member of the State Senate, I would pursue a comprehensive bi-partisan reform initiative in the state legislature that dismantles the currently skewed power structure and is better able to adhere to the priorities of the people of New York.

New York taxpayers are plagued by Albany's wasteful, fraudulent, and secret spending, preventing us from allocating sufficient resources toward real priorities, including security, education, and healthcare. Rather than address these matters, complacent lawmakers have been satisfied to maintain sky-high tax rates, in a short-sighted attempt to offset ballooning spending. In the long term, this hostile tax footing serves only to constrain economic growth, worsening our economic sustainability.

Albany's dysfunction has become its most defining characterstic. To move toward a more responsive state government that makes better decisions on behalf of New Yorkers, we must demand full spending transparency and fight undue entrenchment and centralization of power among incumbent lawmakers. As our elected officials have repeatedly chosen complacency over reform, the only way to bring about substantive change is to send new voices to Albany.

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