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The Niagara-Gazette on pay raises for state politicians, April 4

Raise your hand if you got a 40% raise this year.

Raise both hands if you ever received a 40% pay hike in your entire life.

How many struggling New York business owners, homeowners and residents could raise even one hand? Few, if any.

Around here, it seems it’s best to work in government if you ever want your pay to increase well beyond anything resembling what the rest of us consider to be normal standards.

In case you missed it, in a 92-46 vote early Monday, members of the state legislature agreed to raise Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s salary to $250,000 by 2021. Approval of the measure means Cuomo’s current salary, $200,000, will jump up to $225,000 next year and $250,000 in 2021.

Once finalized, the pay hike will result in Cuomo being the highest paid governor in the country, topping California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom whose current salary is $202,000 per year.

In addition to a raise for Cuomo, a majority of state lawmakers agreed to give Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul a raise, from $190,000 currently to $220,000 in 2021.

Both hefty and wholly inappropriate raises follow the December vote in which a state committee, consisting entirely of government-appointed political types, called for an increase in salaries for state lawmakers from $79,500 to $130,000 over a three-year period.

Did we miss something? Weren’t these the same people who spent the past few weeks lamenting the lack of state funding for priority items like education and infrastructure?

How is it that, right at the tail end of the budgetary process, they managed to find the money to pad their own salaries?

We don’t buy the argument that they work hard. Forget the idea that they’ve somehow “earned” it.

New York State legislators are part-time employees and the bulk of their time is spent, you guessed it, cutting ribbons, holding press conferences about mostly nonsense and working on getting re-elected.

Those of us who pay the taxes and pick up the tab for New York’s largess should be on the telephone right now to the governor’s office, the lieutenant governor’s office and the district offices of our state representatives.

We should be telling them that we didn’t get a 40 percent raise this year and we don’t appreciate them hiking their own salaries at our expense, for what amounts to no good reason.

At this point, it might be good to start thinking about organizing for the next state election cycle, with an eye on identifying viable candidates to challenge Cuomo, Hochul and any and all legislators who agreed to support this nonsense.

Or maybe, as some of us have for far too many years now, we’ll just stay silent and let the powers-that-be in Albany take more of our money while we contemplate how to pay the mortgage, feed the family and send the kids to college on a salary that grows oh-so modestly if at all.

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