"The proposal for a new public employee pension tier is an assault on the middle class and a cheap shot at public employees," Danny Donohue, president of the Civil Service Employees Association, the state's largest public-workers union, said in an e-mailed statement. "It will provide no short-term savings and will mean people will have to work longer, pay more and gain less benefit."
DiNapoli, the Democratic comptroller who oversees the retirement fund, said that having a 401(k) would be "less secure" than a public pension.
"We've been pretty clear that if you want to provide retirement security for older New Yorkers or older Americans, defined-benefit plans are a smarter way to go," DiNapoli said in an interview yesterday.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, and Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos both said they believed the pension proposals could win approval in the Legislature this year. They said the same for Cuomo's plan to reduce county payments to Medicaid, the joint federal-state health-care program for the poor. Cuomo wants the state to absorb increases in local Medicaid costs by 2015 as the state takes over the cost of administering the program.
Bloomberg Support
Cuomo's proposals may save New York City billions of dollars over several years, Bloomberg said in an e-mailed statement. He backed the governor's plan to resolve an impasse between the state Education Department and teachers' unions over "rigorous teacher evaluations," which the mayor said would help identify and remove ineffective teachers from classrooms.
"He has my strong support," Bloomberg said. "The governor's priorities are the right priorities for the state, and I will be working with him to move his agenda forward."
The mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
Cuomo is riding record-high approval ratings at 73 percent, according to a poll released Jan. 16 by Siena College in Loudonville, New York.
In 2010, his first year in office, Cuomo erased a $10 billion deficit, got New York's two biggest government-worker unions to agree to pay freezes and furloughs, instituted a property-tax cap and pushed through a bill legalizing same-sex marriage.