Twenty-seven* school districts were seeking to override the state's property tax cap in yesterday's school budget votes. Twenty of these districts -- or 74 percent -- failed to collect the needed 60 percent supermajority to pass, according to news accounts. The closest result was in the Cornwall School District in Orange County, which fell two votes short of an override supermajority. Read More
Financial disclosure filings made public yesterday have revealed that Governor Andrew Cuomo has a net worth of at least $1.75 million. But in one sense, that doesn’t actually make him unusual among New York government employees at his level of education and experience. Read More
The latest economic data for New York continues to relate a tale of two states. Private sector employment growth in New York as a whole slightly trailed the national average on a year-to-year basis, but was much stronger in the New York City metropolitan area. The 52-county upstate region grew at just half the national rate from April 2012 to April 2013, according totoday’s monthly jobs release from the state Labor Department. Read More
Maybe the nation’s CEOs don’t watch enough TV, or perhaps they lack a sufficient appreciation for Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. Read More
The state pension fund gained about 10.4 percent on its investments during the recently ended 2012-13 fiscal year, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced today. The latest gain is comfortably above the pension fund’s 7.5 percent target rate of return. Read More
Opponents of Governor Cuomo’s 2 percent property tax cap were able to stick one major exclusion into the legislation before it passed in 2011: a provision excluding a portion of local government and school employee pensions from the total allowable “levy limit” in years when taxpayer-funded employer contributions rise by more than two percentage points of salaries. Read More
New York’s rate of growth in withholding tax receipts during the final quarter of 2012 was among the lowest for any state with an income tax, according to the latest quarterly State Revenue Report from the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Read More
President Obama’s proposed cap on itemized federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes would cost New York residents $3.8 billion a year, according to a report released by Governor Cuomo’s office today. However, you’ll have to dig a little to find that number: Obama isn’t mentioned until page 11 of the 26-page document. Read More
New York is cited as “something of a case study in all that is wrong with Medicaid,” but also as a state “in the vaguard” of Medicaid reform, in a new National Affairs article by Paul Howard, director of Manhattan Institute’s Center for Medical Progress. 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
New York’s new “stable option” pension gimmick for local governments and school districts is “a stopgap with long-term risks,” Moody’s Investor Service warned this week. Read More
Noting that New Yorkers had been treated last week to “almost daily political perp walks” involving “a parade of office-holders,” an editorial in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal pointed out: “The bigger scandal in the Empire State continues to be what the politicians do that’s legal.” Read More