Governor Patterson finally did something right, and of course the liberals are criticizing and condemning his choice to replace Hillary Clinton as our senator. He had the audacity to appoint Kirsten Gillibrand, an upstate conservative-thinking congressperson, to be the new senator. Obviously, the power brokers in the state wanted ALL the power to be from the big city.

Five out of six isn’t good enough for the liberals. With the governorship, assembly and senate leadership, attorney general, and comptroller all within the NYC area, it still doesn’t satisfy the political moguls. If it isn’t one of their choosing, they feel threatened. They hate independent thinkers.

The biggest criticism of the new senator seems to be that she was A-rated and endorsed by the National Rifle Association. The next in line is that she voted against the banker rescue plan, commonly called the bailout. Somehow, the fact that the bankers and financial institution executives that got the billions refuse to say what they did with the money, doesn’t bother those who voted to skin the taxpayers in order to give this big gift.

Ms. Gillibrand agrees with the NRA that gun control isn’t about controlling guns, but rather about controlling law-abiding people. However those who criticize her and NRA seem to have a difference regarding the definition of the term “reasonable.”

Most of the liberal idiots believe that “reasonable” means banning all guns except for military and police. Some think that even the police should not carry guns and that that even the military should not be as well armed as they are.

We shouldn’t use the term “liberal idiot.” It is redundant. There are some liberals who actually have high intelligent quotients, but when they speak of gun control, it would seem their book learning by far exceeds their common sense.

We should be pleased with the governor’s choice. At last, he did something for upstate citizens. After he announced the huge budget shortfall and his failure to convince the legislators that they have to cut back on the spending, his popularity started to drop. For all his experience in being a legislator, he appeared to lose the skills he needed to be effective as a minority member of the senate.

Oops! We forgot. A minority member in the New York dysfunctional government doesn’t have a chance to be effective. Come to think of it, the average majority legislator doesn’t become effective until he or she gets seniority or position. Committee chairmen have awesome power and legislators will do whatever it takes to get “leadership” to give them the position.

The recent shift in power in the senate caused a great shift in who gets the extra money and best accommodations in the office buildings. It is a reasonably safe bet that the bills the committee chairmen release from their committees will be done with the strict approval of the leaders, who undoubtedly will be highly influenced by the New York City leaders.

The high probability is that upstate New York will not be treated anywhere as well as the downstate residents. In the world of politics, those without power have few privileges. We hate to sound pessimistic, but we are willing to bet that the upstate citizens will have to adjust their standard of living downward.

We also predict that the politicians and those in favor, especially downstate, will do much better and many will prosper. It will be interesting to see what the next two years will bring. If the politicians don’t find solutions instead of excuses, it could be possible for the Republicans to regain the Senate. That would make New York City politicians very unhappy.

One of the benefits of a crisis is that it often forces people to face realities. Realities have a consequence of often being grim. Wars cause deaths and destruction that are the extreme of grim. The financial crisis is usually not fatal, except for those who can’t handle the hardships associated with it and commit suicide.

Loss of property can be very destructive to a family that has to make severe adjustments in their standard of living. The loss begins with not having enough money to pay for the things they want, and then continues to cause the loss of things they need.

A person or family can get along with only one automobile. It is inconvenient, but it is doable. Cutting down on the clothing budget is another area where a person can reduce expenses. As long as they are dressed reasonably well and warm, they are OK, but for the person who has long been obsessed with style, this is a hardship. There is often confusion for some when it comes to defining luxury and necessity.

A real disaster comes when the person loses their house. The person who worked to get a status symbol of a house, which was larger than they needed, suddenly realizes that it is no longer affordable. He faces a huge trauma watching it be placed on the market by the bank. They then have to really cut back on their standard of living.

The reduction of income or the balloon payment on real estate, is an indication that the person was living beyond his means and often the fault was strictly an indication of them “keeping up with the Jones.”

It may be that the family had two incomes and suddenly lost one because of employment loss or medical problems. What was once affordable, suddenly became a debt that was no longer payable. That is a tough situation to face. The obvious answer can be bankruptcy.

There is another way that a person can lose his home and has no bearing on his ability to afford what he purchased. That person is one who worked to buy a house he could afford, worked to improve his property and then retired on less income than he had when he was drawing a salary.

Perhaps he delayed retirement until he believed that he could live the rest of his live in that home he worked for and loved and considered it to be an assest that he could look at with pride of accomplishment.

Then, the government went on the spending spree and saw his house as “their” asset and taxed it to the hilt. They not only made him pay a higher tax rate each year, but when the tax rate became an issue, they then sent out the local assessor who arbitrarily placed a value on the house that also raised the taxes without changing the tax rate.

It can be argued that property taxes on a home are the most unfair of all the taxes. For all practical purposes, property taxes remove the sense of ownership and make the person whose name is on the deed only a tenant. The government actually owns the property because if the taxes are not paid (and this can be compared to rent) the owner is evicted and the government sells the property for “back taxes.”

Whether it be a mortgage foreclosure or a tax sale, the person is now deprived of his property. While we can blame the person who agreed to pay a mortgage he actually couldn’t afford and shrug off his loss as his own fault, the poor retired person who has his property taken from him by the government had nothing to say about the increase in his expenses regarding property taxes.

Perhaps it is their fault. They keep electing politicians who keep spending money recklessly, and cause the taxes to increase. People should buy responsibly, but there seems to be no limit to the stupidity of voters who keep putting people back in office who cause the financial problems.

When it comes to government, problems don’t just happen. They are caused. We get the government we deserve. Remember that for the next four years.

How can we get the states and country back on the track? Most taxpayers agree that it can’t get done by bailing out the incompetent CEOs of the financial industry and the auto makers. However, that is the way the government is doing it.

Can you understand why the government would give away hundreds of billions of dollars to the financial industries and stock market firms without a detailed plan on how the money will be used? That isn’t bad business sense — it is rotten business practice.

What’s worse, the CEOs for those industries won’t tell the government how the money they have received is being distributed. We haven’t seen the banks open up the credit markets or the consumers regaining confidence in the stock market. However, we can reasonably assume that the CEOs are still getting high salaries, and quite possibly a bonus for their royal screw-ups that brought this debacle upon the country.

Where did the money go? To begin with, the wealth was only on paper and/or a Ponzi scheme. There wasn’t any real money to back up the transactions. It was done on credit and manipulation. As long as the people on the top of the food chain were getting rich, it didn’t matter to them who at the bottom and in the middle got hurt.

They never subscribed to the rational theories that “If you can’t afford it, you can’t have it.” Or that “Nothing is worth more than what a person is willing or able to pay for it.” They changed that with their smoke and mirrors financing.

The sub-prime mortgage scam is a perfect example of these principles. People who could not afford the inflated prices within the real estate market were conned into believing they could get the low cost mortgages and the inflation of home prices would eventually make them a profit, so they could sell it and have money to buy another house.

Fast buck artists had TV commercials on how a person could get rich in real estate without investing any of their own money. One huckster said the person should get as many credit cards as possible (he confessed that he had more than two hundred in his dresser drawer) and borrow against their lines of credit to finance their real estate purchases. Some people did make money with this scheme. Others didn’t do so well.

If it hadn’t been for the manipulation of the lending industries, the prices of homes would not have escalated at the rate it did. Now, those who purchased homes at the inflated prices are feeling the panic of owing more than the house will bring on the market. Foreclosures are becoming a reality, and what will the bank do in the foreclosure sale when they can’t recoup what they lent? Easy answer! They will ask the government to bail them out. Oh! They already did that.

Greed is a powerful motivator. From the lenders who got commissions from the sales, to the poor souls who believed they could not only afford the property, but profit from the purchase, the crash was a rude awakening. The bankers will still be rich, but the buyers will most likely go broke. It is the little guy who gets hurt. This is almost a law in big business.

Congress should have a thorough investigation involving all those people involved in the stock market, insurance companies, and banking industry. They should scrutinize those who received the bailout money to see if they can prove malfeasance, manipulation or fraud. If they can, those involved should be sued for their ill-gotten gains and be stripped of all their assets to help with the repayment of “borrowed” taxpayer money.

There may be reluctance on the part of Congress to do this because of the close connections the politicians have with those who make generous contributions. However, those politicians who resist looking out for the taxpayer in favor of protecting the people responsible for the financial debacle should be voted out of office in the next election.

Once more, most politicians don’t see the light unless they feel some heat. It is up to the taxpayers to light the bonfire.

Governor Patterson has just thrown anywhere from 88 to 134 new taxes and fees against the wall to see what will stick. If there ever was a time for a taxpayer revolt, this is it. As usual the politicians want the taxpayers to bail them out for their excesses in spending and mistakes in developing programs.

In all fairness, the governor is talking about cuts in spending and one of the areas he proposes to make a cut is in aid to education. Simple for him to stop sending money to the school districts and take credit for lowering the outlay from Albany, but since schools have no interest in cutting spending to reduce costs, the local property owners will make up the difference with higher school taxes.

This brings up another issue regarding schools. This columnist has long complained about the schools being top heavy with administration. We believe that we could cut the Department of Education by two-thirds and not have a negative effect on education in local school districts.

We also believe that local school districts have too many people in administration who draw high salaries and really don’t produce any improvements in the classrooms. Education depends on teachers who are motivated to teach students. Administrators seem to be more interested in test results, so the teachers have to teach students to pass exams rather than to teach the students how to think and be creative.

When schools had the objective of teaching the pupils the three major subjects of reading, writing and arithmetic, and not focusing on social promotion, the graduates were much better prepared to make a living in the real world.

It is tragic to learn that many high school graduates can’t do math without a calculator, can’t construct sentences in a paragraph in a way that makes sense and can’t speak with proper grammar. Many colleges have to have special remedial classes to accommodate the students who didn’t learn and develop those skills in school.

A popular TV program puts so called educated adults against a fifth grade curriculum and more fail than pass. A recent program contestant was a science major in college, had six of his fraternity brothers to help him, and still did not do well. In fact on one of the simple questions, ALL of them got the wrong answer.

What’s the answer to the question about why do we spend so much on education and yet, have such poor results? A quick answer is that we spend the money in the wrong places and have lost the concept that schools are for educating students and not for giving high salaried jobs to people who are not really necessary.

Consider this as a fact. When a school budget is voted down, all the cuts come in areas that hurt the students. First, they cut out transportation and cafeteria services. Then, they cut programs like sports, art and music. Teachers are laid off, but we can’t remember when there were cuts in administrative positions in order to save money.

To offer a few suggestions to make schools more efficient and get the focus back on educating students, we suggest a consolidation of schools. It makes little sense to pay administrators and staff in a district of 3,000 students large salaries. Instead, adjoining school districts should merge so that no district has fewer than 10,000 students.

Since superintendents typically have an employment package worth around $200,000 per year, merging three districts into one would save close to a half million dollars in salaries and benefits in that one position alone. Then, add the reduction in salaries of those in pupil personnel, transportation and the other administrative positions, and it can easily reach more than a million dollars in savings.

Not only does it save in salaries, but it saves the taxpayers from paying for huge pensions after retirement. It also would be practical to raise the age for collecting pensions for those in the system.

The teacher’s unions are among the most powerful in the state, and to make these changes would take courageous assemblymen and senators, plus a strong governor. It doesn’t appear that this kind of talent and necessary attitude are occupying the offices in Albany. It won’t happen unless the people in each district insist to their legislators that this type is action is necessary if the politician expects to be re-elected.

There must be considerable input or we will keep reminding our readers that we get the government we deserve. Don’t accept excuses. There is a big difference between “can’t” and “won’t.”