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Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver may seek a pay hike for members of the New York State Legislature before the year is out, today’s New York Post reports. New York part-time lawmakers now make a base salary of $79,500 a year, plus $171 for every day in Albany and added stipends for leadership positions and committee chairmanships. Read More

There was virtually nothing new in Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s speech on public pensions in Washington, D.C., yesterday — nothing the comptroller hasn’t said before, as recently as a month ago. Read More

Governor Cuomo’s 2012-13 budget, to be presented later today, will command media attention for the rest of the week. Advance reports on his modified pension reform proposal are especially promising. Meanwhile, there’s a (fiscally) cost-free approach to helping local governments and school districts alleviate their budget problems: repealing the Triborough Amendment. Read More

Mayor Bloomberg's latest ed-reform plan has attention. To get the teachers' union to support merit pay, Bloomberg proposes to give teachers a salary hike of $20,000 if they prove "highly effective" for two years in a row under a new teacher-eval Read More

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has joined Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver in advocating an increase in the state minimum wage. Unlike Silver, Bloomberg in his State of the City message was at least willing to acknowledge that the minimum wage discourages hiring–specifically, that it “can reduce youth employment.” His solution? Read More

Let's make a deal - you give me $650 today, and five years from now I'll give you $10,000 back.  That incredible return on investment is what some forward-thinking federal agencies are taxpayers, according to the National Archives and Records Admin Read More

The MTA prefers to bargain in secret, but the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 has a list of what it says are the MTA's demands for the next three-year contract for New York City subway and bus workers. The current contract expires next Sunday Read More

In a just-completed radio interview, Governor Andrew Cuomo talked a little more about his State of the State announcement last week concerning a proposed new convention center at Aqueduct Raceway in Queens. But Cuomo’s answers raised a few other questions. Read More

Little-noticed in the continued over Gov. Cuomo's proposed gambling-conventioneering complex in Queens is the mass-transit part of it. Genting, the company that Cuomo favors, has produced a fact sheet on its "New York Convention and Exhibition Ce Read More

In addition to , Speaker Sheldon Silver this week that the Assembly will seek to reduce state taxes on the working poor. Specifically, Silver said: Under our plan, working families who earn less than $30,000 annually will see their inco Read More