Paterson Tries To Appease Staff With Raises, Screws The Rest Of Us Though

Governor Paterson is experiencing some rough times these days. That massive budget deficit we have is causing him significant difficulty in deciding what to do about it, but unfortunately it seems if there's a bad choice to make, he'll go with it. Take for instance this latest mistake of giving raises to his top staffers, presumably to keep them from leaving their jobs. Now that's great for those few who work in the Governor's office, but what about the 130,000 state employees he told would have their wages frozen?

From The NY Post:

ALBANY - Gov. Paterson has secretly granted raises of as much as 46 percent to more than a dozen staffers at a time when he has asked 130,000 state workers to give up 3 percent pay hikes because of the state's fiscal crisis, The Post has learned.

The startling pay hikes, costing about $250,000 annually, were granted after the governor's "emergency" declaration in August of a looming fiscal crisis that required the state to cut spending and impose a "hard" hiring freeze.

One raise was approved as recently as last month - when Paterson claimed the budget deficit had reached an unprecedented $15.5 billion.

That would be another blow to the Governor's claims to wanting shared sacrifice in these tenuous times. Seeing stories like that do not make me feel so bad to hear about Paterson being chanted at and having buttons for a fair tax all around him. He had a few supporters in the room where the conference for the Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators was being held, but many of them wanted to see Paterson stand behind their issues by reducing the spending cuts (especially with a few billion more than expected from the stimulus bill) and instituting additional taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers so that "shared sacrifice" could actually be called a legitimate slogan when all is said and done.