Gov. Kathy Hochul’s State of the State plan to send a $500 check to New York families is an incredibly short-sighted plan to fight inflation and, frankly, boost her flagging approval ratings as Democrats come out of the woodwork looking to mount primary challenges against the governor.

The governor made the inflation reduction checks the first centerpiece of her January State of the State speech, following former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s lead of trying to generate excitement by releasing bits and pieces of their goal-setting speech a full month before the speech actually takes place in January. Hochul wants to ask the state Legislature to spend $3 billion on direct payments to 8.6 million taxpayers, with the money coming from excess sales tax collections that Hochul said have exceeded historical averages.

We won’t argue that inflation has made life harder for many Chautauqua County residents. Rising fuel, heating, housing and grocery costs have become a drag on the budgets of thousands of families who were already barely scraping by before skyrocketing inflation took its toll. We will argue that Hochul’s plan is foolhardy for two reasons.

First, everywhere you turn there’s someone asking New York state to pay more for something: education funding, aid for seniors, aid to municipalities, aid to hospitals, aid for senior care, aid for roads and bridges, just to name a few that regularly come up in government circles. Every year the state government cries poverty, but now there’s suddenly $3 billion lying around in the governor’s couch cushions. Hochul’s behaving like someone who won the lottery and, rather than paying off their house and car, chooses to give it away to charity. It’s noble, but foolhardy.

The bigger issue is the checks are simply a one-month reprieve for all of us for whom inflation is a pain. Once the $500 is spent, inflation will remain. The governor is proposing a $3 billion expense that doesn’t accomplish anything other than a quick bump in the polls for the governor. The $500 checks will be gone in the blink of an eye and inflation will still be here. People deserves break – but that break should be something they can count on for more than a month. New York could do its part by cutting some of its taxes and fees that serve as hidden costs of simply trying to get by – fees on driver’s licenses, car registrations, the state’s share of sales taxes or the laundry list of fees that all add up and are particularly burdensome for low-income workers.

Three billion dollars is a lot of money. We should be able to do more with it than $500 checks.