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The stock market turmoil of the last week is a reminder of why it's risky, verging on foolhardy, for New York's state government to depend as heavily as it does on high-income households and Wall Street investors. In the current fiscal year, taxes paid by the highest-earning 1 percent of New York taxpayers—including commuters to jobs in the state—are expected to generate 43 percent of personal income tax receipts, which in turn translates into 27 percent of total state taxes. Read More

The Mercatus Center at Virginia's George Mason University is out with a 50-state ranking that says New York State's "overall fiscal solvency" is among the worst in the nation. The new study suggests that New York's state government finances fall into the "poor" category—ranking 46th, or roughly about as messed up as those of New Jersey (49) and Illinois (50). Read More

One of the best things about New York's newly adopted state budget for fiscal 2016 is something that's not in it (yet): a costly new state subsidy of homeowners' local property taxes. Governor Cuomo's Executive Budget proposal included an income tax credit (of the type also known as a "circuit breaker") that, when fully implemented by 2019, would funnel $1.7 billion a year to about half of the state's homeowners, plus renters. Read More

He didn't use the phrase himself, but the property tax credit unveiled yesterday by Governor Andrew Cuomo is of the type commonly known as a "circuit breaker." Like an electrical switch designed to automatically prevent a power overload, a circuit breaker tax credit is supposed to kick in when homeowners' property tax burdens overload their ability to pay. Cuomo's proposal would not represent a property tax cut but a means-tested state personal income break -- available only to some homeowners, and not available to owners of commercial, industrial or multi-family properties, which pay a hefty share of local taxes. Read More

The multi-year tables in New York State’s just-released Enacted Budget Financial Plan for fiscal 2015 make continued use of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s new fiscal conjuring device: a lump-sum, below-the-line reduction in future projected spending, based on the assumption that the governor will “propose, and negotiate with the Legislature to enact budgets that hold State Operating Funds spending growth to 2 percent.” Read More

By midnight on April 15, more than 8.5 million personal income tax returns for 2013 will have been filed with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. Roughly one-third of those filers will owe nothing, and big chunk of total PIT receipts will come from a tiny fraction of high-income taxpayers. Read More

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is calling New York’s newly enacted budget a “Grand Slam.” But while the fiscal 2014-15 spending plan enacted last week certainly can’t be written off as the worst swing and miss ever, it’s far from a base-clearing, walk-off home run. Read More

Over the past few days, Governor Cuomo has made it clearer than ever that his “tax cut” focus next year will be on something that can be more accurately described as a tax shift: the creation of a new property tax “circuit breaker” credit that homeowners could claim on their state income taxes. The credit would rebate a portion of local property taxes, to the extent that they exceed some set percentage of each homeowner’s income. Read More

President Barack Obama’s proposed federal budget revives his proposal to cap the value of itemized income tax deductions for the highest-earning 3 percent of taxpayers, a category starting at $200,000 of taxable income for single filers and $250,000 for married filers. Read More

Senate Republicans today unveiled some new proposed personal income tax (PIT) adjustments that would generate savings for middle-class families.* For a couple with income of $70,000 and two children under 17, the potential annual tax cut from the proposed Family Tax Relief Act would appear to come to roughly $700... Read More

The Wall Street bonus pool for 2012 expanded by 8 percent, but remains well below the peak levels of a few years ago, according to a release today by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Read More

New York’s rising unemployment rate is “presenting a challenge for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo as he tries to build an image as a fiscal centrist who can transform the state’s business climate,” today’s New York Times reports. Read More