Blog

Last week, at a Manhattan news conference that was also “live-streamed” on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s website, the chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the president of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) reflecting a tentative contract deal that will shape the MTA’s labor compensation costs for years to come. Read More

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, has been named by Governor Cuomo to a commission “charged with advising the State on how to best invest the Governor’s proposed $2 billion Smart Schools Bond Act in order to enhance teaching and learning through technology,” as announced by the governor’s office today.* Read More

Job growth in the Empire State trailed the nation once again in March. New York’s 12-month increase in payroll jobs was 1.5 percent, compared to a 2 percent growth rate throughout the U.S, according to the state Department of Labor (DoL). Read More

New York has earned a poor grade on yet another ranking of state tax climates — this one issued by the Small Business & Entrepreneurship (SBE) Council, a research and advocacy group based in Virginia... Read More

The Tax Foundation, which ranked New York dead last on its latest annual State Business Tax Climate Index, today issued a highly complimentary analysis of the corporate tax reduction and reforms enacted as part of 2014-15 New York State budget... Read More

New York State’s relative economic performance wasn’t so hot in the recent past — but its outlook for the future is worse, according to the just-released 7th Annual Rich States, Poor States report, an economic competitiveness index produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Read More

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