New York State's main pension fund investment pool earned 10 percent in its third quarter and has gained nearly 30 percent since the end of its 2020 fiscal year, according to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the fund's sole trustee. As of Decemb Read More
The death toll in New York's long-term care facilities jumped by another 1,516 this weekend as the Cuomo administration adjusted its reporting on adult-care facilities to include residents who died after being transferred to hospitals. Read More
The state Health Department has revealed additional detail about coronavirus deaths in New York nursing homes, showing for the first time how many residents of each home died of COVID-19 outside of the facility, typically in a hospital. Read More
Numbers belatedly released by the Cuomo administration last week pushed New York's COVID-19 mortality rate in nursing homes from 35th to 13th highest in the U.S., an Empire Center analysis shows. Read More
In a letter to governors two days after President Biden's inauguration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that the pandemic-related federal public health emergency "will likely remain in place for the entirety of 2021." Read More
Governor Cuomo’s Executive Budget for fiscal year 2022 authorizes an enormous increase in state-supported debt, all in the form of non-voter-approved backdoor borrowing—and all of it pointedly excluded from the state's statutory debt cap. Read More
The Cuomo administration's resistance to sharing pandemic data from nursing homes has broadened to withholding vaccination numbers as well as full death counts. Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court today kept alive federal litigation that could cost New York a big chunk of the billions of dollars in taxes it collects from nonresidents working for New York-based employers. Read More
New York's post-pandemic employment recovery came to a halt and moved into reverse in December, according to the state's for the final month of COVID-wracked 2020. Private payroll employment in December was 966,000 jobs below the level of the pre Read More
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Governor Cuomo's Medicaid budget is how little it changes the program's spending pattern. In spite of a once-in-century pandemic that rocked the state's health-care system and decimated state revenues, the g Read More
Amid the economic and fiscal fallout of the pandemic, in a proposed FY 2022 budget that would postpone $400 million in scheduled middle-class tax cuts while imposing $1.5 billion in tax-surcharges on millionaire earners, Governor Cuomo is also seekin Read More
Somewhere within that vast fog bank of a FY 2022 Executive Budget that Governor Cuomo is a structural budget gap, opened during the pandemic recession and temporarily obscured by piles of federal cash that will eventually be gone with the wind. O Read More
"...the Empire Center is the think tank that spent months trying to pry Covid data out of Mr. Cuomo's government, which offered a series of unbelievable excuses for its refusal to disclose...five months after it (the Empire Center) sued, Team Cuomo finally started coughing up some of the records." -Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2021SIGN UP TO READ ABOUT THE ISSUES IMPACTING NEW YORKERS.