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California, with no budget and with its cold, hard cash quickly leaving the building, could soon resort to drafting taxpayers as less-than-volunteer lenders to the state, or worse. Read More

Nicole is in today's New York Post with an highlighting the weaknesses of the "doomsday budget" unveiled last Friday by Mayor Bloomberg. Read More

Mayor Bloomberg announced his budget this afternoon for the fiscal year that starts in July. The mayor expects that a combination of federal stimulus, state funds, tax hikes, spending cuts, and labor givebacks will close a $4 billion budget gap tha Read More

When Kodak its latest round of mass layoffs yesterday, the company's in Rochester gave the news prominent play on its web page — right next to an reporting that the city "has finally received approval on a $4 million state grant for Rochester’ Read More

New York City's economy contracted 5.5 percent in the fourth quarter from the same period a year earlier, after a 2.7 percent contraction in the third quarter, according to the . The most recent figure is the worst in the nearly two decades since th Read More

The House passed the $819 billion stimulus last night. The final version contains some amendments that affect the (tiny) infrastructure-investment part of the bill. Two amendments are good, though not good enough to outweigh the fact that only fiv Read More

In the waning days of the asset and credit mania, Macquarie and Cintra paid the state of Indiana $3.85 billion upfront for the right to run the Indiana Toll Road for 75 years and collect all of the toll revenues. The concession company that Macqu Read More

In a passage reflecting House Democratic spin on the supposed economic benefits of the stimulus package, today's Washington Post that the bill includes aid "that many economists agree will enter the economic bloodstream quickly and trim further layo Read More

People worried about the state of America's infrastructure haven't received the House stimulus bill very warmly. After political promises of bold, smart investments in physical assets, a $40 billion allocation for transportation and transit in an $8 Read More

House Democrats in Washington, D.C., claim their will require for how the added money is spent.  In reality, they’re pushing an unprecedented intrusion by the federal government into state and local decision-making on how to reallocate scarce re Read More

State and local governments face a total deficit of about $131 billion for 2009 and $181 billion for 2010, the Government Accountability Office . Honestly, this estimate seems low. But, low or not, it may be as good as it gets. The GAO notes that Read More

NYU prof Thomas Philippon and U-VA Prof Ariell Reshef have written a tracing the trajectory of wages in the American financial sector over the last century. Not surprisingly, financial-industry wages broke away from the rest of the economy starting i Read More