Cuomo For President?

Charlie Gasparino, a senior correspondent for Fox Business Network and a columnist for The Daily Beast, thinks Gov. Andrew Cuomo has his eyes fixed on the presidential prize.

Mr. Cuomo’s budget this year, some people in New York suppose, is a presidential campaign announcement:

“The son of Mario Cuomo—‘the liberal's liberal,’ to borrow a phrase from The Wall Street Journal—declared the state "functionally bankrupt" thanks in part to its big-government policies. He then declared war on both the welfare state and his father's old liberal voting base (and the base of the New York State Democratic Party): The public employee unions, the special-interest groups, the lobbyists representing health care and education, all of whom have for years forced the state to live beyond its means because of automatic funding increases regardless of "outcome measures" and with "no performance measures," he said.

“When he gets done with them, Cuomo vowed, they would all be running around the state capitol in Albany ‘like their hair is on fire.’

“According to people close to the governor, it wasn't just talk. They say that Andrew Cuomo has changed politically. He's left his old lefty friends in the dust and recognizes that the old formula of keeping government big by taxing rich people and businesses is a fool's game; they will just leave the state, as they've done in droves, taking their tax revenues with them. He also recognizes the Ponzi scheme that is big government ("Enron," he called it) where budgets are balanced with accounting gimmicks and borrowing that can't be sustained because the day of reckoning—where investors won't lend the state money because they're afraid they won't be paid back—is coming near.”