Those cuts to the state budget that you’ve been worrying about – stop worrying. Nothing’s going to change. Oh, it’s possible that the $10,000 gift you and your lodge brothers were hoping for from your local assemblymen to put a new roof on the lodge hall might be reduced to $9,000 next year, but that’s about all. Your cousin who works in the Department of Assignation and Remediation, fielding calls for the assistant deputy commissioner in exchange for a salary of $120,000, is not going to lose his job. The Thruway is not going to close. State troopers are not going to be laid off -- they were just guaranteed four years’ worth of raises.

In fact, if you want to be really persnickety about it, state spending is not going to be cut at all. It’s still going to go up. What is going to be cut, ever so slightly, is the projected increase in state spending.

That’s true. Last year (meaning fiscal year, April 1 to March 31), state spending was $116 billion. The projected spending for this new fiscal year was $121.7 billion, an increase of 4.9 percent. The governor and the Legislature just agreed to cut $427 million out of that amount, which calculates to a cut of approximately one-third of 1 percent and which means that spending will still go up very nearly the same 4.9 percent.

So if you feared that our state government was changing the way it does business, please stop fearing.