Avi Schick, head of the Empire State Development Corp. for 2007 and 2008, in today's Daily News. He wants to use our taxpayer-guaranteed state and city pension funds to prop up the teetering local construction and commercial-real estate i Read More
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"The prospects of an early agreement between [New York City] and its bankers on an economy program ... to avert payroll and interest defaults ... remained doubtful yesterday. "While the city and its bankers, with Governor Lehman sitting in, were str Read More
Macquarie Infrastructure Group, partner in the long-term Indiana Toll Road "public-private partnership," . The document illustrates how much riskier the market perceives such deals to be. The details once again point up the fact, then, that such lo Read More
With more than $200 billion in federal stimulus money going directly to states, one might think that the feds were done bailing out the not-so-thrifty of the fifty (plus Puerto Rico). Municipal Market Advisors, which studies the state and l Read More
The Times offers that a couple hundred million dollars (at least) of for the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority through new bridge tolls and a payroll tax wouldn't actually be new revenue going to the MTA. It would be a ste Read More
In her state of the city address, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn just proposed a 15 to 26 percent hike in the city's income-tax rate for mid-six-figure earners and above. Together with a , the idea would bring New York City's top rate to nearl Read More
Just in time to further debunk claims that the wealthy don't pay their "fair share" of New York State taxes, the Assembly Majority Ways and Means staff has issued a pessimistic new assessment of the economic outlook ("bleak") and revenue forecast (si Read More
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