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By midnight on April 15, more than 8.5 million personal income tax returns for 2013 will have been filed with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. Roughly one-third of those filers will owe nothing, and big chunk of total PIT receipts will come from a tiny fraction of high-income taxpayers. Read More

New York perennially lands at or near the bottom of state rankings based heavily on measures of government spending, taxes and regulatory burdens. However, taking account of other factors that play more to New York’s strengths, the Empire State’s ranking soared to 26th in the 13th Annual State Competitiveness Report... Read More

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is calling New York’s newly enacted budget a “Grand Slam.” But while the fiscal 2014-15 spending plan enacted last week certainly can’t be written off as the worst swing and miss ever, it’s far from a base-clearing, walk-off home run. Read More

New York ranks number-one in the Tax Foundation’s latest annual ranking of combined state and local tax burdens, released this morning. As of 2011, the combined per-capita tax burden on New Yorkers came to 12.6 percent of per-capita state income, the report said. The national average was 9.8 percent. Read More

Another month has brought another poor jobs growth report for upstate New York. Today’s Labor Department release shows statewide private employment in February was up 1.6 percent over the same month a year earlier, trailing the national rate of 1.9 percent — a slightly smaller margin than in previous months. Read More

Over at SeeThroughNY, our team works really hard to post fresh data quickly and accurately — when it’s available, that is. Read More

“Why are property taxes so high? Because we have 10,500 local governments,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said yesterday, repeating (yet again) his favorite mantra. Cuomo clearly wants to imply that he’s referring to 10,500 autonomous entities, falling over one another in a virtual orgy of bureaucratic excess. Read More

Is Wall Street roaring back — as a revenue-generating force for New York’s insatiable state and city governments, that is? You might get that impression from glancing at today’s press release from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, which headlines the finding that the average bonus for securities industry employees in New York “grew by 15 percent to $164,530 in 2013, which is the largest average bonus since the 2008 financial crisis, and the third highest on record.” Read More

Is Wall Street roaring back — as a revenue-generating force for New York’s insatiable state and city governments, that is? You might get that impression from glancing at today’s press release from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli... Read More

As if $420 million in annual handouts to the film and television industries wasn’t enough, New York State legislators are now proposing to give millions to the music industry and Broadway. Read More

Despite the not-rosy fiscal status of the county, the Suffolk County Legislature approved the last outstanding contract for county police officers. (In January, Moody’s listed Suffolk County among the municipal bond issuers facing a credit rating downgrade.) Read More

New York State added private jobs at a slower pace than the nation as a whole during the 12-month period ending in January, according to data released today by the state Labor Department. Read More