Blog

Gotham Gazette has launched a new game: "." It presents almost infinite choices on how to cut city spending, as well as every politician's favorite proposed tax hike and how much money it could raise or not. The game is useful not only for the pure f Read More

Over at , Larry Littlefield has posted a of "the issue no one wants to talk about" — i.e., the extent to which state and federal tax policies favor the old over the young. Read More

The has issued a new study documenting the continued flight of the middle-class from New York City.  offers valuable data, insights and anecdotes.  But, in something of a CUF tradition, it strives mightily to downplay the role of taxes in creatin Read More

Today's on the lessons that America can draw from Japan's experience in investing in public works as economic stimulus made some good points. However, some of the numbers the article cites -- on which kind of public investments deliver the great Read More

E.J. testified before Albany's Joint Legislative Fiscal Committees today. One tidbit illustrates the Empire State's acute dependence on Wall Street: Just how dependent on Wall Street had we become?  Consider this: in 2006, auto manufact Read More

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