This week we “spring” ahead by setting the clocks forward and enjoying more light in the evening.  But in the state Capitol, there won’t necessarily be more sunshine.

This week is the annual recognition of the need for government openness.  First celebrated in 2005, “Sunshine Week” was launched as a collaboration of national news organizations to promote transparency in government.  The idea is that governments are more effective when they allow public oversight and access to documents and proceedings as well as openness helps curb waste and increases government efficiency and effectiveness.

The rationale for celebrating the need for government openness this week – as compared to any other – is that March 16^th is the anniversary of the birth of James Madison, our fourth President, and one of the principal figures in the Constitutional Convention.  Madison advanced guarantees incorporated into the Bill of Rights, in particular the freedoms of religion, speech, and the press, protected by the First Amendment.  He understood the value of information in a democratic society, as well as the importance of its free and open dissemination.

It was Madison who observed that “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both.”

Too often, Madison’s comments have proven true.  From the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, to the corruption in the Watergate scandal, it has been clear that the lack of public oversight of governmental decisions can lead to disastrous results.

Here in New York, governmental secrecy has resulted in some of the state’s biggest scandals.  Recent decisions to limit the state Comptroller’s oversight of state governmental procurement decisions have contributed to shocking scandals.  The top aides to the previous governor were convicted of corruption and sentenced to prison because of their decisions to rig government contracting in favor of major campaign contributors.

It is unlikely that such schemes could have succeeded if another agency had monitored those decisions.  People behave differently if they think they can be caught.  Corruption risks increase in secrecy.

It was revealed last week that the Hochul Administration is enduring a controversy surrounding an alleged effort to circumvent normal government contracting processes.  According to media reports, the former acting state budget director was relieved of her duties as the result of an investigation by the state Office of the Inspector General.  She has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

While the inspector general’s office would not provide details of the probe until it is completed, Albany’s Times Union reported that some government vendors have complained about multi-million-dollar contracts being awarded to the company where the former acting budget director previously had worked.  Some of the specific complaints centered on contracts that were awarded outside of the normal competitive bidding process. 

As mentioned, no charges have been filed but the former budget director and another top ranking official have left their positions.

In addition to that controversy, it was also reported that Governor Hochul’s budget plan proposed to strip away some of the state Comptroller’s oversight of government contracting. 

In an analysis of Hochul’s budget, the state Comptroller’s office stated that the governor’s plan would exempt some $12.8 billion in state spending from competitive bidding as well as oversight requirements he called “essential for maintaining the integrity of the procurement process.”

There is a reason why New York’s Constitution establishes a separately-elected Comptroller.  It’s an effort to ensure that independent audits of state spending are conducted and done so in a way to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in government.

Cutting back those powers is an invitation to scoundrels – and New Yorkers have seen how the results – scandals.

The shenanigans playing out around the Comptroller’s powers and the controversies around procurement in general also raise an interesting question:  Why allow no-bid contracts at all (outside of a bona fide emergency)? 

Albany should use “Sunshine Week” to strengthen – not weaken – the oversight powers of the Comptroller and begin public hearings into the state’s process of awarding contracts. 

Let’s heed Madison’s prescient warning that the lack of public oversight of government is “a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both.”  Let’s let the sunshine in.

Albert Einstein is often credited with making the observation “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  So it is with New York’s approach to higher education, trying the same policy over and over and expecting different results is a failed approach.

The state’s system of higher education is in deep financial trouble.  Far too many community colleges, four year public colleges as well as private ones are facing declining enrollments – some significantly – and receiving at best stagnant state financial help.

Decades of state neglect – and worse – have taken their toll on New York’s higher education sector.  For example, the roll out of the higher education policy named “NYSUNY 2020” in 2011 resulted in nearly constant hikes that raised tuition rates by more than 42%.  When factoring in inflation, the automatic tuition hikes at the State University of New York (SUNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY) far exceeded the growth in the economy.  And while students and their families were asked to shoulder more of the tuition burden, the state did not keep up its end of the bargain to increase state funding.

In fact, policies adopted under NYSUNY 2020 created widening gulfs between the financial needs of colleges and the funding levels provided by the state.  Prior to 2011, New York would increase the maximum TAP award to match the state’s public college tuition. This protected the lowest income students from the impacts of tuition hikes.  In addition, students attending independent colleges and universities would benefit from enhanced affordability by boosting TAP support.

The state’s NYSUNY 2020 law de-coupled the maximum TAP award from rising public college tuition rates and decreed that the colleges themselves would have to supplement financial assistance to the lowest income students.  This hole – the “TAP Gap” – cost millions of dollars every year that had not been borne by colleges over the past decades before. Laudably, the governor and Legislature eliminated it in last year’s final budget.  However, the financial damage caused by the prior years’ gaps was not restored.  Those previous years’ policies have undermined the financial strength of public colleges and universities today. 

As a result, even prior to the pandemic, the SUNY system was losing undergraduate enrollment from its 4-year colleges and community colleges, which continued through the pandemic.  Only SUNY’s four University Centers escaped this enrollment slide.  For institutions inside SUNY that are overly reliant on tuition dollars, lost enrollment can translate to financial insolvency quickly.  And that day is rapidly approaching.  All but six of the twenty-five state-operated SUNY campuses have structural or projected deficits.  In total, these institutions have an aggregated deficit of $160 million.

The experience in the independent sector was similar to SUNY.  During the pre-pandemic period, larger colleges and universities saw growth in the student populations, where smaller ones saw losses.  The pandemic has made it worse for the smaller private colleges, most notably with central New York’s Cazenovia College announcing it will permanently close after the spring 2023 semester, two years before the college’s 200th anniversary.

The governor’s budget plan unfortunately does too little to reverse the trajectory of New York’s system of higher education.  Moreover, she has proposed policies that contributed mightily to the decline.  Raising the costs by hiking public college tuition while freezing financial aid will only shift more of the costs of attending college to families and further undermine efforts to increase enrollment.  Furthermore, freezing state support for both the private and public sectors will do little to help keep struggling colleges afloat.  Local economies will be collateral damage of this short-sighted approach.

Therefore, shortchanging higher education falls into the Einstein definition.

The final state budget should take steps to make colleges – both public and private – more attractive to would be college students.  A few ideas would be to freeze public college tuition and commit to a multi-year increase in state support to help balance SUNY’s (as well as CUNY’s) books.  In addition, return the state support to private colleges to 1990 levels – rather than providing assistance that is one-third of what it was thirty years ago. 

A smart approach would put more resources into financial aid programs in order to offer services that help to attract and keep students.  Look to modernize the 50-year-old Tuition Assistance Program.  The students of 2023 are similar, but not the same, as the college students of 1974.  Increasing assistance as well as coverage for non-traditional and part-time students could also go a long way toward meeting the needs of today’s generation of students and improving their job prospects and the state’s economy.

We know how this movie ends.  It’s time to stop doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  It’s time for New York to reverse the college financial “death spiral” and do something innovative.

During his State of the Union address, President Biden challenged Congressional Republicans to pledge to leave Social Security alone as the nation’s budget gets hammered out.  This challenge was smart politics —the program is a popular one, particularly among seniors, who turn out to vote in large numbers.

Some high-profile Republicans had been—and some continue to be—banging the drum for cutting Social Security.  And while their plans essentially seek to undermine support for the program, particularly among younger adults, the basic critique is accurate:  The program is spending more than it generates in revenues.  Unless something is done, in a decade or so the program may have to cut back benefits.

Here is the situation.  Social Security is financed primarily by payroll taxes on employers, employees, and the self-employed.  In addition to tax revenues, Social Security trust funds also receive intragovernmental interest payments on the Treasury securities they hold.  Those securities were purchased because, until recently, Social Security was running annual surpluses and those revenues were used to purchase U.S. Treasury securities.  However, once the revenues coming in did not match the money being paid out to Social Security beneficiaries, the program had to start cashing in its securities. 

If current law remains in place, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Social Security trust funds are projected to be exhausted in the calendar year 2033.  When the trust funds are exhausted, then the Social Security Administration would still be able to pay some benefits, but it would not have the authority to make payments in excess of the payroll taxes received each year.

Thus, it would have to reduce benefits.

So, what should be done?  Some Republicans are arguing that now is the time to cut back spending on the program.  Florida US Senator Rick Scott floated a plan to have all federal programs expire after five years and thus trigger a re-write of programs that lawmakers wish to extend.  He later backed off that plan, saying that he did not mean that Social Security and Medicare should be sunset.  Former Vice President Pence has said that everything should be on the table when considering changes to Social Security.

Something must be done.  An idea being pushed by Vermont US Senator Sanders goes after one big loophole in how Social Security is funded.  In 2022, only income up to $147,000 was subject to the Social Security tax.  That number goes up with inflation and is expected to be $160,000 this year, but there are many people that make more—and some a lot more—than $160,000.

Sanders raises the question, why should their income be exempt from taxation?

According to the CBO, just that increase could generate enough revenue to push off the date that Social Security revenues fail to adequately cover expected expenses.

According to Senate Democrats, applying the payroll tax on Americans’ earnings above $250,000 per year and changing the tax so it also applies to investment income as well, would extend the program’s life span by 75 years.

A cap on taxable earnings has existed since the inception of the Social Security system in 1937. 

The maximum taxable amount reflects the original purpose of the program: to provide workers with a “safety net” of retirement income.  Over the years the cap was increased in order to help maintain the program’s solvency.

But Sanders raises an important question – why have a cap at all?

After all, much has changed over the past 85 years.  The wealth gap has meant that those with the highest income have more of their income exempt from Social Security taxation.  When payroll taxes for Social Security were first collected in 1937, about 92 percent of earnings from jobs covered by the program were below the maximum taxable amount.  In 2020, about 83 percent of earnings from employment covered by Social Security fell below the maximum taxable amount. In short, the cap itself makes the tax regressive.

It is clear that the cap must be changed, but the first question should be whether to have one at all. 

Approximately 67 million Americans receive benefits under the program.  That’s about 1 in 5 people.  Without Social Security, 22 million more Americans would be below the poverty line, including almost a million New Yorkers.  The average benefits are quite modest, around $1,670 per month.  Any reduction in benefits would result in more people being forced into poverty.

As with any financial problem, the longer one waits, the more difficult the choices.  The same is true now.  So, doing nothing may be smart politics, but leaving the problems to fester will make future policy options worse.

Whistling past the graveyard can’t solve the Social Security problem.  Acting, and acting quickly, can. 

The strategy of wealthy corporations seeking to influence public policy follows a “political cookbook” first devised in the 1960s.  At that time, the tobacco industry hatched a plan to attack government regulation after the US Surgeon General’s report on the health hazards of smoking.

The plan was complex and comprehensive, but it included a few key strategies: undermine the science with funded “experts” willing to advance Big Tobacco’s perspectives; fund “front groups” of aligned businesses and associations that lacked the moral backbone to reject its donations; and shower elected officials with campaign contributions and other gifts in order to buy political fealty.  These strategies, coupled with well-funded public disinformation campaigns to sow doubt, bamboozled the public and for decades blocked the enactment of meaningful public health protections. 

As a result, millions experienced needless diseases and early deaths– a plague upon America and the world.

But public health advocates uncovered the deceptions and tactics of the tobacco lobby and reversed the debate.  For the past twenty years, tobacco use has shrunk, the industry has paid hundreds of billions of dollars in public health damages, and its political influence has waned.

During this time, the oil industry was taking notes.  After its own scientists reported that the burning of oil, coal, and gas would heat up the planet and could lead to catastrophic consequences for all humanity, the industry sprang into action.  It closed its scientific research and began its own disinformation campaign of attacking independent science, funding front groups, and investing in political mouthpieces of all kinds.

Their campaign has worked – and continues to work throughout much of America.  Yet, in New York, the public interest pushed back and stopped the effort to allow industrial scale extraction of gas through “fracking” and pushed forward meaningful environmental measures to shift the state away from the reliance on fossil fuels for its power.

Despite the positive work done to combat tobacco addiction and to move toward reliance on non-fossil-fuel power, both the tobacco and fossil fuel industries have recently advanced new disinformation campaigns in New York. 

The most widely-reported is the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to roll back the state’s efforts to reduce its reliance on oil and gas for power.  As reported in the New York Times, last year the gas industry spent nearly a million dollars to block the state’s efforts to require that new buildings rely on electricity for power and heat, not fossil fuels.  This year’s version focuses on the ludicrous campaign to scare New Yorkers into thinking that the government is looking to take away gas stoves.  The industry is spending big on a public relations campaign, and presumably showering money on allied groups and elected officials.

This time, the tobacco industry is following the oil and gas lobby.

Industry groups, bolstered by the big bucks of the tobacco lobby, are lining up in opposition to Governor Hochul’s proposed ban on flavored tobacco products, as well as her proposed $1-a-pack hike in cigarette taxes.

Why is the governor proposing a ban on the sale of flavored tobacco?  Currently, flavored cigarettes and flavored e-cigarettes (“vapes”) are banned for sale in New York.  In 2009, the Congress banned the sale of flavored cigarettes – except menthol flavors.  In New York, the state bans the sale of all flavors in vapes.

The reason for the current restriction is pretty obvious – flavored cigarettes and vapes are designed to make it easier for kids to suck in the harsh emissions from these products.  The sweeter the taste, the easier it is to get hooked.

Governor Hochul’s plan plugs the remaining gaps – other flavored tobacco products, such as that found in cigars, cigarillos, and chew, as well as a ban on menthol flavoring.

The industry is fighting back hard, arguing that forbidding flavors impacts adults’ “choice.”  But it is obvious to anyone who has watched the industry, and their front groups, that they know they need flavorings to entice and keep new generations of hooked tobacco users to replace those who quit, get sick, or die.  Otherwise, their industry will itself die.

Thus, the tobacco industry has organized a new disinformation campaign to undermine the science.  It’s enlisting its usual allies – those who sell these deadly products – as well as adding hired public relations firms to push their deadly opposition.

New Yorkers have seen their poisonous playbooks before, but it’s been a while since the tobacco lobby got involved in a high-visibility effort.

Don’t be fooled.  Both Big Oil and Big Tobacco are using their bags of money and tricks to once again block needed public health and environmental protections.  This time, the governor and state lawmakers should blow away the smokescreens and put the public interest first.  These fights are likely to play out in the budget, so we’ll know soon enough whether lawmakers have the spine to stand up to these powerful special interests and their disinformation campaigns.

The year-end profits for the West’s biggest privately held oil companies were released last week and the results were staggering: a record $200 plus billion.  And when you add the companies controlled by governments – Aramco for example – the industry is getting richer on a scale never seen before.

Exxon Mobil made $56 billion in profit last year, its largest annual haul ever.  Chevron earned $36 billion, also a company record.  Shell, Europe’s biggest energy company, doubled its profits in 2022 to almost $40 billion — the highest in its 115-year history.

In fact, of the top seven western, publicly-traded, not-government-run oil companies, every one with the exception of Marathon Petroleum more than doubled their earnings.  And Marathon’s still rose by 67%.  All told, the companies pulled in $228 billion last year, tens of billions of which they used to enrich their stockholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks. 

For example, Chevron announced a $75 billion buyback program.  Exxon announced its own $50 billion repurchase plan in December.  The record profits and share repurchases paid out to investors in 2022 by the western majors have provoked outrage.  Most notably, last week President Biden commented in his State of the Union address that those actions “in the midst of a global energy crisis” were “outrageous.”  He proposed quadrupling the federal tax on corporate stock buybacks.

The comments of the United Nations Secretary-General were even more pointed: 

“It is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from the current energy crisis on the backs of the poorest, at a massive cost to the climate.  This grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people while destroying our only home.”

Those record profits are largely driven by the economic recovery following the COVID pandemic-related recession and the war in Ukraine.  After years of pressuring Big Oil to curb production, political leaders from London to Berlin to Washington changed tack last year as prices surged, calling on companies to boost output or help them procure replacements for boycotted Russian fossil fuels following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

As a result, Big Oil is raking it in.

Instead of allowing the companies to enrich their shareholders and fatten their bottom lines, why not divert some of those earnings to offset societal costs resulting from climate change related storms and rising sea levels?

New Yorkers will have to pay tens of billions of dollars to address the climate crisis.  A 2022 federal report found New York State experienced 51 billion-dollar disaster events due to the climate crisis from 2000 to 2021 – costing the state between $50 to $100 billion, and up to $20 billion in 2021 alone.  And more intense storms and rising sea levels pose threats to the state’s coast lines along the Great Lakes, the Hudson River and, of course, the Atlantic Ocean.  Protecting those shores will be extremely expensive.  For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that it will cost $52 billion to protect New York Harbor alone.

Let’s not forget that the crisis we are now in is the result of the oil industry’s efforts.  The industry knew for decades that the burning of fossil fuels will lead to the planet heating up.  Instead of taking responsibility for their business practices, they engaged in a campaign of aggressive climate denial.  Decades of opposition to environmental protection legislation and international treaties has resulted in a climate crisis that only dramatic action can help to mitigate.

They are now making money hand over fist.  And they believe they will continue to do so for years to come.  Chevron chief Mike Wirth recently stated that “The reality is, [fossil fuel] is what runs the world today.  It’s going to run the world tomorrow and five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”

Why not shift some of those profits to offset the financial, health, and environmental burdens we will all face as a result of climate change – changes that could have been avoided if not for the oil companies’ propaganda?

Legislation introduced in New York and under consideration in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont would divert some of those profits – today and for years to come – to cover climate change induced costs.  The New York bill requires companies most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions to pay a total of $75 billion over 25 years for the environmental damage they have done.  The funds would allow New Yorkers to invest in massive infrastructure improvements, upgrade stormwater drainage and sewage treatment systems, prepare the power grid for severe weather, create systems to protect people from extreme heat, and respond to environmental and public health threats.  

As Governor Hochul and state lawmakers work to hammer out a final budget agreement, they should protect New York taxpayers from the significant and growing costs of climate change.  They should claw back some of the oil industry’s staggering profits to cover the costs of global warming.  Make the climate polluters pay.