The winners are celebrating . . . for now

Jerry Kremer

The elections are now history. There were surprise winners and a few surprise losers on Long Island. Most voters don’t think that far ahead, but because of the climate we live in, 2011 won’t be a very good one for the bi-county area, with its 3 million-plus residents.

Not one of the candidates that got elected or re-elected this week has pledged to restore money to our schools or to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in funds to rebuild our roads. Not one of them promised to give our hospitals the money to treat the growing number of poor people who crowd our emergency rooms for basic care.

If ever there was a time for Long Island’s voters to fasten their seat belts, it’s now. The halls of Congress will be inhabited by a group of politicians who got elected by promising to gut health care and education programs and to make government a lot smaller. If they can’t tear the system apart in the next year, they have another idea, and that is to shut down the government completely.

The new Republican House of Representatives will have to deal with a group of crazies who want to turn Social Security into private investment accounts and who think Medicare is money wasted. After all, they think, if the pioneers were able to survive as they crossed America in covered wagons, the 86-year-old retired school teacher from Levittown should be able to function with less of everything from Washington.

Long Island is fortunate to have Republican members of Congress like Peter King. King will again become chairman of the House’s Homeland Security Committee, which is good for all Americans. But many of the new Republican members will treat the conservative King like he’s a moderate Democrat because he doesn’t want to dismantle Social Security or Medicare.

The state of affairs in Albany won’t be much better. New York state has a real deficit of at least $10 billion, if not more. Like that worn tire on your car, there are just so many patches you can put on it before it collapses. There are no more gimmicks left in the state’s bag of tricks to make up for the current deficit, and it has to come from programs and salaries.