After yesterday's budget deficit talks in Washington, D.C. broke down, Governor Andrew Cuomo tried to do damage control here in New York.
The governor held a conference call with his Council of Economic and Fiscal Advisors, to talk about what the failure of Congress' "supercommittee" would mean for the state.
After a political stalemate last summer in Washington pushed the country to the brink of defaulting on its debts and caused the U.S. to lose its Triple-A credit rating, a group of 12 lawmakers was charged with finding a bipartisan solution to reducing the national deficit by $1.2 trillion.
After weeks of more political bickering, the supercommittee admitted failure yesterday.
Governor Cuomo issued a written statement on Monday afternoon, saying in part:
Washington's inability to get its fiscal house in order and work in a bipartisan fashion to create jobs represents a fundamental failure of government that has bred frustration and anger among the people and prolonged the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.
The failure of the supercommittee is supposed to trigger drastic, automatic spending cuts aimed at both military and domestic programs, which would take effect in 2013. However, some members of Congress are already talking about undoing those cuts. President Obama has threatened to veto any legislation that would attempt to avoid the cuts.
But if those automatic federal cuts do go into effect, the state's Budget Division estimates that New York could potentially lose $5 billion dollars in federal funding over the next 10 years.
In response, the governor says his staff is working with his Council of Economic and Fiscal Advisors to develop an expedited job creation and fiscal stabilization plan.
