New York State's so-called millionaire tax, temporarily raising the state's top income tax rate to 8.82 percent from the permanent law limit of 6.85 percent, is next scheduled to expire at the end of 2019. The added tax generates roughly $4.5 billion a year, about 9 percent of net personal income tax revenues, making New York more dependent than ever on the highest-earning one percent of its taxpayers. The future of the tax has now emerged as an issue in the gubernatorial campaign. Read More
New York's hospitals have made seeming progress on reducing avoidable readmissions, but the state's performance on this key quality indicator remains among the worst in the country, new federal data show. Read More
Governor Cuomo has launched yet another broadside at the Trump administration over implementation of the new federal tax law. Read More
Claims about an "age tax" in the House GOP's health care overhaul are particularly misleading in the context of New York's insurance market. Read More
Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon cited a lot of statistics in favor of single-payer health care in her debate with Governor Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday, but most of them were confused, misleading or false. Read More
When motorists in New York top off their gas tanks this Labor Day weekend, they’ll be paying an average of about 45 cents per gallon in state and local fuel taxes—the 5th highest total in the nation, and second highest in the Northeast. Read More
When it comes to rhetorical use of upstate New York unemployment statistics, Governor Cuomo is consistent. Unfortunately, he's consistently misleading. The latest example came at today's ribbon-cutting today for the new 136,000-square-foot Expo Center at the state fairgrounds in Syracuse, where Cuomo delivered a roughly 25-minute stream-of-consciousness riff that focused on what he portrayed as an economic turnaround in upstate and the Syracuse area. Read More
State officials are still working overtime to shield government unions from the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME. This week, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office has issued new guidelines effectively giving the unions the first say on efforts by employees to opt out of union dues payments. Read More
For New Yorkers wondering whether a statewide single-payer plan would be feasible and affordable, the RAND Corporation’s just-published report provides only partial answers. Read More
Desperate to minimize a potential loss of dues under a recent Supreme Court ruling, one of New York State’s largest public employee unions is telling public employers to disregard the union’s own previously stated conditions for letting workers stop paying dues. The tactic employed by the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) in response to the Janus v. AFSCME decision will put local governments in a bind—which is likely to end up generating added legal bills for taxpayers. Read More
New York's unfunded liability for state government retiree health coverage has reached $90.5 billion—an increase of $3 billion over last year's estimate, and nearly $13 billion in just two years, according to the just-released First Quarterly Update to the state's FY 2019 Financial Plan. The liability for other post-employment benefits, or OPEB, reflects the net present value of continuing state health insurance coverage available to all employees who retire directly from a state government payroll after at least 10 years of service. Read More
This is only the latest instance in which politics seem to be taking precedence over public interest at a consumer-focused regulatory agency. Read More