Federal prosecutors suggested this week that a "culture of fraud" has afflicted the Long Island Rail Road. They were referring to alleged phony disability claims by LIRR employees -- but the phrase could just as well describe the chronic lowballing of past cost estimates for the LIRR's East Side Access connection to Grand Central Terminal. Read More
Commentary
Among the many objections raised by public school groups when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo began pushing his tax cap last year, perhaps the weakest was the claim by teacher unions that the law would "erode democracy." Read More
Proponents of an increase in New York's minimum wage argue that no full-time worker — especially a head of household raising children — should have to live on $7.25 an hour, or $15,000 a year. Read More
The pitfalls of a government-run health insurance system were best summed up by political satiristP.J. O'Rourke: "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." Read More
Later this month, the U.S. Census Bureau will release its rundown of K-12 public education expenditures for the school year that ended in 2010. Read More
Mike Spano was elected mayor of Yonkers last fall with the strong support of municipal labor unions. Now the state's third largest city is on the brink of fiscal disaster -- and Spano must persuade his labor friends to make significant contract concessions. Read More
This week, school districts across New York State have been firming up their 2012-13 budget proposals -- the first to be affected by the state's new property tax cap. Read More
With a pen stroke last week, Gov. Cuomo issued an executive order establishing a New York Health Benefit Exchange to comply with the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. Read More
'The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax," Albert Einstein once complained to his accountant. Non-geniuses scrambling to meet next week's Tax Day deadline would surely agree. Read More
If you think driving in New York is an unusually jarring experience, you are not imagining things. As measured by federal statistics, highway and bridge conditions in the Empire State are among the worst in the country. Read More
The Cuomo administration’s Medicaid-reform strategy is riskier than most New Yorkers realize in good part because it doesn’t reform the Empire State’s longstanding practice of seeking to grab every federal Medicaid dollar it can get. Read More
There was an air of anticlimax to the state budget deal announced this week by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and state legislative leaders. Read More