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
Commentary
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
Soon after he was elected governor 16 months ago, Andrew Cuomo made a point of publicly touring a state juvenile-detention center in the Mohawk Valley, west of Albany. Read More
Over the next few days, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the legislature negotiate the final details of a state budget for fiscal 2012-13, New Yorkers will be hearing very little about Medicaid -- a subject that used to dominate the headlines out of Albany this time of year. Read More
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's hype machine went into overdrive late last week after the Legislature passed a scaled-back version of his Tier 6 pension reform plan. Read More
President Obama recently announced his intention to restrict what can be sold in private vending machines at public schools as a way to address the obesity crisis among children and youth. Read More