On Wednesday, April 9, the village board presented its budget on time, with our services fully funded, replete with strong bond ratings from the most prestigious Wall Street agencies and our reserves strong and healthy.

It is a budget that does not disguise costs with gimmickry and fiscal idiosyncrasies. We are fully able to maintain long and short-term investments with an orientation to promote solvency and fiscal integrity.

Our budget maintains a conservative, reasonable level of borrowing and we do not rely on disproportionate debt to finance current expenditures.

Our budget focuses on creating a structural balance between ongoing revenues and expenditures by accommodating itself to fluctuations in economies and not by depending on one-time or windfall revenues thereby minimizing short-term borrowing.

Our capital projects are carefully planned with a premium on infrastructure management that begins with a top down approach establishing the key results that local government and its residents would like to see their community achieve. Moreover, we prioritize capital activities and link it directly to the capital budget.

Our revenue and expenditure forecasting processes are thorough, accurate and utterly transparent and include a multi-year perspective. In addition, tax increases despite the burdens of binding arbitration and unfunded mandates are habitually and steadfastly kept below the inflation rate. Our tax increase this year is 2.78 percent, which is, once again, below the inflation rate.

Finally, we subject our budget and our entire financial operations to an annual financial audit in accordance with accepted accounting principles and we routinely receive from the auditors a clean bill of health. Moreover, our confidence in our structural balance is such that we have an open invitation to the NYS Comptrollers Office to do a complete audit and review our budget practices.

What a difference from the fiscal distress afflicting the New York State budget. It is an example of how explosively volatile economies can be and how it can blindside the taxpayers when not properly managed. Unfortunately, we are not insulated from what happens in Albany in terms of revenue sharing and financial aid, especially in light of the ominous deterioration of the state's economy as well as a Long Island economy already troubled with uncertainty.

Yet, despite all the talk about economic doldrums and a recession looming over the darkened horizon, the state continues to exhibit all the earmarks of misadventure by continuing to spend more than it's taking in. Worse still, even in the face of extensive borrowing to help balance the budget, spending is still slated to increase almost 5 percent. Calls by Governor Patterson to slash $800 million of spending with a 2 percent across the board cut as well as a 2 percent decrease in local assistance excluding some education and entitlement programs is symptomatic of the state's systemic budgetary problems as well as its shortsightedness. If state spending weren't so profligate year after year, there would be no need for a bare bones budget.

The disconcerting truth is that programs pop up yearly without any sound basis on how to pay for them. New York is a liberal state and in liberal states, the entitlement frenzy is the sport of choice. It's about who gets what, when and where and how that translates into votes and political support.

In the short term, this is good politics; but for long-term economics, it's downright suicidal. Back in the 1930's Harry Hopkins, who played an integral role in the FDR Administration composed his own sing song mantra to underscore the new politics: "Tax tax, spend spend, elect elect!" Yet after years of "tax tax, spend spend," the Gross National Product in 1939 was still more than 10 percent less than it was at the time of the 1929 crash - an economic collapse of unprecedented proportions. The New Deal was successful in providing a safety net, but it was WWII and its economic engine that got the economy airborne.

Nevertheless, the Hopkins' philosophy, with all its self-serving and self-indulgent pretensions, continues to demagogue over New York State politics with a vengeance. The upshot is that things are a bloody mess.

If there was ever a pressing need to put the brakes on runaway spending by trying to be all things to all people, to cut mountainous waste without strangling budding and established entrepreneurial energies with ubiquitous and highly graduated taxation - that time is now. Governor Patterson is making an earnest effort, but you can't undo in one year, years of entitlement that is enshrined in the state budget. To make matters worse, the system is rigged against us here locally and it is hard to ferret out all the shenanigans. The one thing we do know is that to make up shortfalls the state has historically, if not habitually, shifted much of the state's share on county taxpayers on Long Island. Moreover, a disproportionately small amount of federal funding, which is distributed by the state, goes to Nassau and Suffolk counties.

The one bright spot is that the Republican Senate has resisted the fraudulent egalitarian notion that the way to finance our way out of this dilemma is to raise taxes on the wealthy. They are wise enough to know that this could cause a stampede to the greener pastures of other states and then what? The exodus of moneyed interests in New York State will be well nigh calamitous. When was the last time a poor person gave someone a job, or invested capital to create jobs or paid high taxes that sustains government programs that help the poor, not to mention a good portion of the middle class?

When President Clinton, in an Inaugural Address proclaimed, rather flirtatiously I thought, that the era of big government is over, he was, as the ensuing years have proved, dead wrong. The very system of having our tax dollars commute north to Albany and south the Washington DC only to return back to us in significantly depreciated sums, is evidence enough of big government's meddlesomeness.

As I have noted before, we have as much chance of changing this merry go round system as the medieval alchemist had of changing his metal into gold. While it is an illusion to believe that federal funds and state funds are anything other than taxpayer funds it is, nonetheless, overwhelmingly seductive for the recipient of these federal and state grants to believe their group, organization, school, etc. is getting something for nothing as well as yielding to the gift giver (usually the elected representative) the accompanying hosannas for procuring those grants.

Like everything else in politics, it's a two-way street. Nevertheless, I applaud our local legislators for securing whatever grants they can obtain on our behalf. They did not, after all, invent the redistributive system, they merely inherited it and are compelled to play within the existing rules or ruin their constituencies with neglect. The problem is we in the downstate area continue to get shortchanged and Albany, even while withholding a disproportionate share of our dollars, still can't keep their head above water.

The upshot will almost certainly be cuts that will be painful to bear and one wonders how much the state will, through lavish borrowing, be mortgaging our common future with a growing and insupportable indebtedness. It's no way to do business. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, lamented that Rome is dying - yet it laughs. Well, New York isn't dying but it is hurting badly and its wounds, like most wounds in life, are self-inflicted.