Blog

Federal officials have reportedly confirmed that they are cutting off a major portion of funding for New York’s Essential Plan, opening a roughly $1 billion hole in the state budget and raising new doubts about the future of a rapidly growing health insurance option for the working poor. Read More

Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a bill mandating broad insurance coverage for three-dimensional mammography, formally known as digital breast tomosynthesis, despite a lack of evidence about the long-term efficacy of the procedure. Read More

New York's second largest public pension fund continues to move—at a glacial pace—towards a more reasonable and prudent assumption of its future investment earnings. Read More

A bill requiring health plans to cover digital breast tomosynthesis, a three-dimensional type of mammography, has been delivered to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office for his signature or veto. If the measure is enacted into law, it would be a classic case of healthcare politics rushing ahead of medical science. Read More

For a second consecutive year, the state Public Service Commission (PSC) has deeply slashed the amount of renewable energy that utility companies are forced to buy under Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Clean Energy Standard (CES). The move casts further doubt on the governor’s goal of having renewables supply 50 percent of the state’s electricity by 2030—while reinforcing the CES program’s status as primarily a bailout for money-losing upstate nuclear plants. Read More

For the eighth consecutive year, New York's governor and Legislature have failed to comply with a decade-old law designed to foster a "quick start" of the state budget process for the next fiscal year. Read More

The largest upstate New York metro areas had weak or declining private job numbers in October, and the state as a whole trailed the national employment trend, according to the latest year-over-year data from the state Labor Department. Read More

The lead editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal highlights the role that high taxes have played in driving migration trends out of New York and other high-tax states. Marginal tax rates matter, as the Journal very correctly points out. Unfortunately, in making this important point, the editorial relies a bit too much on a misinterpretation of migration data produced by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which tracks the movement of taxpayers among the 50 states. Read More

Ten days after the report's Halloween due date, Governor Cuomo's Division of the Budget (DOB) has just issued a mid-year Financial Plan update that might as well be wearing a fright mask. The update reduces revenue projections by $850 million this year, and by another $850 in each of the next two years, mostly as a result of an estimated $750 million drop in annual personal income tax reductions. Read More

New York State's budget gap through fiscal 2018-19 could be a whopping $4.6 billion worse than indicated by Governor Cuomo's latest Division of the Budget (DOB) projections, according to new estimates from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Read More

Until a few months ago, Governor Cuomo could boast of producing an "on-time budget" in each of his first six years in office. But he also continues to steadily build on another kind of record: for a seventh consecutive year, he has now missed the statutory deadline for issuing the state's Mid-Year Financial Plan Update. Read More