Brace yourself for despair when Governor Hochul rolls out her 2025 agenda in her State of the State address on Tuesday.
With Hochul’s long track record of closing its ears to the public – on crime, taxes, congestion pricing, energy – it’s not safe to expect more of the same this year, especially given the early leaks of her plans.
Fine, with the state spending almost $240 billion a year, it will call for some nice-sounding new spending (youth health care; free school meals, even for those whose families can afford it).
But she will completely ignore what voters really want.
Take the congestion charge. New Yorkers opposed it by a whopping 51% to 29% margin, according to a poll in Siena last month, knowing full well how unpopular it was — which is why she “paused” it over the summer.
But it was revived just days after the November elections.
Her green agenda is also causing a lot of pain, but instead of backing down, she is expected to push for a new cap and invest program, hitting oil companies who will simply pass on their new costs to consumers.
That means you pay more for gas, home heating and cooking, electricity, etc., so that Albany can “invest” in subsidies for unreliable alternative energy sources.
Even though New York has the highest state and local taxes in the country, Hochul refuses to lift a finger to lower them. Instead, she raised them further – and maybe again this year.
All this because she claims she wants to make life here “more affordable”.
Nor will she dare push for major solutions to disastrous criminal justice “reforms” – such as cashless bail and Raise the Age – even though they have increased crime since they were introduced five years ago.
Not because Hochul believes in that nonsense; she is simply unwilling to take on the legislature’s progressive revenues and the special interests that feast on Albany’s skyrocketing spending.
Any governor committed to improving life in New York would strive to, for example, fix the state’s broken crime laws and eliminate the cap on public charter schools (which routinely outperform traditional public schools).
But Hochul is reluctant to challenge Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who oppose such efforts.
No wonder a poll in Siena shows that 57% of New York voters prefer “someone else” besides Hochul as governor, while only 33% say they would vote to re-elect her.
It’s also why New Yorkers have fled to other states: October census data showed the state lost a greater share of its population in 2023 than any other state.
It’s true that New York has been shrinking relative to the rest of the country for decades, but the trend is now accelerating.
And Hochul’s State of the State will only provide more reasons to head for the hills.
Voters who remain in New York will be able to express their dissatisfaction by electing “someone else” next year.
