Blog

Working added overtime to increase retirement benefits—i.e., pension padding or “spiking”—is an old tradition in the public sector, especially among police officers, firefighters and other employees working under contracts that provide them with ample overtime opportunities. Read More

New York’s heavily tax-subsidized healthcare sector also can function as a patronage trough for the politicians who do so much to fund it, as we’re reminded by this article in today’s New York Times. Read More

Charter schools sharing space in New York City public school buildings cost less to operate than traditional public schools, counter to the findings of a 2010 research memo from the Independent Budget Office (IBO), according to a white paper issued today by a research group affiliated with former state comptroller candidate and financial advisor Harry Wilson. Read More

Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Budget Division are spreading the word via Twitter that Standard & Poor’s has given its top AAA rating to the state’s $1 billion sales tax revenue bond issue. Read More

For an excellent dissection of how the federal Affordable Care Act will initially affect New York, see this article in yesterday’s New York Post by the Manhattan Institute’s Paul Howard and Yevgeniy Feyman. Read More

Private sector employment in New York increased by 1.7 percent during the 12 months ending in August, a period in which the number of private jobs in the U.S. as a whole grew by 2 percent, according to the latest monthly report from the state Labor Department. Read More

The Tier 6 pension “reform” enacted by New York last year applies to all state and local employees who join the state Employee Retirement System or the Police and Fire Retirement System after April 1, 2012 Read More

Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano has reached a tentative contract deal with the Nassau Police Benevolent Association (PBA). That’s what Nassau residents have been told via Newsday and the other Long Island news media, at any rate. Read More

A new national study estimates that New York’s two largest state-level pension systems have unfunded liabilities of at least $260 billion, using an alternative calculation method that estimates pension liabilities using more conservative interest rate assumptions... Read More

Job growth in New York over the past year fell below the national rate for the first time since the recession, Comptroller Thomnas DiNapoli points out in a report issued today. Read More

Key state lawmakers are introducing what would be the largest state bond issue in New York’s history — a $5 billion environmental bond act. Read More

The Tax Foundation has posted a nifty interactive map depicting “Migration of Personal Income” among the states. Based on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data, the foundation says net migration from New York between 2000 and 2010 translated into a net loss of $45.6 billion of income. Read More