Mayor Bloomberg's "draconian" service-cutting contingency plan dominated the headlines when he unveiled his fiscal 2004 city budget proposal last week. But the real news is that the budget has brought the city a big step closer to another massive tax hike, posing a grave new threat to New York's still-shrinking economy. [Read_more]
Mayor Bloomberg's $1 billion "doomsday" budget- cutting plan is widely perceived as a scare tactic designed to force concessions out of Gov. Pataki and the Legislature: Once Bloomberg gets what he needs out of Albany, the contingency plan goes back into a locked drawer in the basement of City Hall. [Read_more]
Gov. George E. Pataki set just the right tone for this year's New York state budget battle when he opened the legislative session in January with a plea to avoid "job killing" tax increases. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver replied: "On the subject of taxes, let me be very clear, the Assembly is not advocating tax hikes." [Read_more]
Long Island's State Senate and Assembly members are patting themselves on the back for having blocked a revival of the commuter tax. But they also have provided the pivotal bloc of legislative support for a big state income tax hike that will transfer more of the Island's wealth to places like Binghamton and Buffalo. [Read_more]
Labor unions and their allies in New York's burgeoning health and social services sector are demanding new taxes on the wealthy to help close the state's $12 billion budget gap. After all, the argument goes, it's only fair to ask those who gained the most from the economic boom to bail the rest of us out of this bust. [Read_more]
Given his Rockefeller Lite persona in recent years, no one would have been surprised if New York's Governor George E. Pataki had responded to a looming fiscal crisis with a round of tax increases, if not on the scale of Democrat Gray Davis's gargantuan $8 billion hike in California, then something like Republican John Rowland's soak-the-rich surcharge in Connecticut. [Read_more]
Facing an uphill battle in Albany to win renewal of New York City's former commuter tax, the Bloomberg administration is floating a new "tax reform" idea that can only be described as breathtakingly wrongheaded. [Read_more]
Faced with a huge and seemingly ever-expanding city budget gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently floated a pair of trial balloons - only to see both ideas promptly shot down by Gov. George E. Pataki. [Read_more]
You wouldn't know it from the gubernatorial campaign commercials, but New York state is facing an enormous budget gap next year. By far the toughest challenge facing the winner of the Nov. 5 election will be to close that gap without derailing a still-wobbly state economy. [Read_more]
