The big Medicaid battle is at the center of the political dispute over this year's budget process. But I'd like to take a look at a few other items in Joe Bruno's budget proposal. Working backwards through Danny Hakim's excellent article in today's Times, let's consider three issues with the Senate's budget:

1) Transparency. As Hakim reports:

The Senate budget also rejects money for 21 new state workers to oversee compliance with campaign finance regulations and cuts financing for Project Sunlight, a plan by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo to build a public database to track the activity of lobbyists, donors, elected officials and special interests.

This is as depressing as it was predictable. Bruno's minions are making a shameless play to check the growing trend towards greater openness and accountability in Albany. The Brennan Center has already jumped on this, and we should expect to hear more from good-government advocates. At least the Assembly, to its credit, seems ready to leave these important efforts alone. 2. Education. According to Hakim:

The Senate added $358 million in new school aid on top of substantial increases planned by the governor, and it tweaked his formula for distributing the aid to school districts.

The Campaign for Fiscal Equity had already praised (pdf) the amount of school funding in Spitzer's budget proposal; I certainly wouldn't oppose additional funding on principle, though there's some reason to be concerned about the "tweaking" of the distribution formula.

I'm still looking for more specific analysis of this change, though given the track record it's a pretty safe bet that Senate Republicans are moving to revert to the age-old share system whereby funding is not targeted to the most at-need districts, but is divvied up into spoils for wealthier suburban schools as well. Republican Senator Steve Saland's complaint about "flatlined" funding in his district is indicative of this.

Meanwhile, the New York State United Teachers have criticized the Senate's budget for failing to regulate the growth of charter schools and for including a "voucher-like" private school tax deduction:

NYSUT Executive Vice President Alan B. Lubin added, "We are extremely disappointed and alarmed that the Senate put forward a budget that sends the wrong signal by failing to enact needed charter reforms and by including a proposal to redirect public funds to private interests through a tuition tax deduction.

3. Property taxes. NYBri has already noted the Senate's slight of hand in not counting property tax rebate checks as spending. Hakim's article further illustrates the dishonesty of this move:

Edmund J. McMahon, the director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative policy group, said that not counting property tax rebates as spending was "like saying any kind of transfer payment is a tax cut."

"It's like saying a Medicaid reimbursement is a tax cut," Mr. McMahon said. "It's simply not so."

Meanwhile, as NYBri pointed out, these untargeted property tax rebates "overwhelmingly favor wealthy districts and wealthy constituents." Hakim again:

The Senate's property tax relief plan would return $2.4 billion to property owners, instead of the $1.5 billion Mr. Spitzer proposed, and it would not exclude the wealthy; the governor's plan is aimed at the middle class.

So the Senate, rejecting Spitzer's proposal for targeted middle-class property tax relief, is instead dishonestly proposing the use of taxpayer money to finance tax cuts for the rich. Quelle surprise!

New York's deeply flawed tax system is the common thread in many of these debates, from Medicaid to education funding to tax relief itself. An interesting study from the Fiscal Policy Institute pointed out that if, from 1972,

New York State had pursued [an] alternative approach ... of indexing its [income] tax brackets and its personal exemption for inflation, rather than cutting brackets from the top, 95% of New Yorkers would be paying less in state income taxes than they pay under the current law but (and this is a very big but) the state would be collecting $7.7 billion more in tax revenue each year.

This in turn, one would imagine, would make it possible to relieve ordinary New Yorkers of some of their property and sales tax burdens.

All of these points, as well as the Medicaid battle, deserve further analysis in the progressive blogosphere.

The budget wars will always be with us, but a comprehensive and progressive reform of New York's tax system - and a rational program of universal health coverage - could do much to simplify the debates. Cross-posted at The Albany Project