Commentary

"With massive budget deficits looming, Mayor de Blasio’s post-pandemic plan boils down to hoping for a stopgap federal bailout and asking Albany for permission to issue billions in deficit bonds. This won’t solve the problem. New York needed a much leaner, more efficient public sector even before the novel coronavirus blew a hole in its tax base." Read More

New York’s slow reopening has begun just in time for a virtual April 15 — Tax Day 2.0, pushed back three months by the novel-coronavirus pandemic. In a way, it’s the end of an era: The tax returns due to be filed on Wednesday will report incomes earned in 2019, the close of a decade-long economic expansion. Read More

Predicting doom and gloom for New York is all the rage. While we do face difficult fiscal choices for the next several years, those with skin in the game are contradicting this “death of New York” narrative — and offering a way out. Developers across the city are asking communities for nothing more than regulatory permission to add jobs, mixed-income housing and new high-quality public spaces. Yet just this week, Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer denounced a multi-billion dollar investment in offices and homes in Long Island City — shortly after denouncing 2,700 new mixed-income homes in Astoria. Read More

The headlines surrounding this week’s New York City budget naturally focused on #DefundthePolice demands. But for all its larger potential implications for New Yorkers’ security and quality of life, the partially illusory $1 billion “cut” in the New York Police Department budget was a sideshow in fiscal terms. Read More

New York is finally ahead of the coronavirus, but its outbreak stands as a world-wide horror story. A sophisticated city was caught unprepared and suffered some of the worst levels of infection and death. The need for an investigation is clear. The harder question is who can credibly take the lead. Read More

On April 2, with New York’s COVID-19 curve still rising ominously, state lawmakers wrapped up a budget almost unchanged from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pre-pandemic January proposal. With the economy in a coma and revenues crashing, the plan obviously was awash in red ink. Read More

With the coronavirus lockdown continuing to erode tax revenues, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has turned up the volume on his demands for a federal bailout of the New York state budget. In a weekend briefing, the governor repeated his estimate that the Empire State will need help closing a deficit of $10 billion to $15 billion. “I don’t have any funding to do what I normally do,” he said. Read More

In case it wasn’t obvious from the headlines and body count, New York is currently suffering more severely from the coronavirus epidemic than almost anywhere else. Read More

The coronavirus pandemic has just claimed its first big institutional victim: the New York state Legislature, which handed Gov. Andrew Cuomo broad and unprecedented leeway to cut state spending in the fiscal year that began Wednesday. Read More

In the predictably messy $2 trillion coronavirus response bill approved by Congress on Friday, one provision stands out as a particular travesty: the nonsensical way it distributes public health funding to the states. Read More

#NYCoronavirus: What he had stumbled onto was one of Albany’s dirtiest little secrets — an addiction to taxing health care, which has gotten steadily worse over the past quarter-century. And now there’s a danger that the coronavirus crisis will become an excuse for state lawmakers to hike the taxes and hit consumers even harder. Read More

There’s an obvious place to start in New York: Freeze state and local government employee pay. The combined estimated savings for every level of government could at least be a down payment on the massive reductions that will be necessary in the year ahead — and probably for years to come. Read More