The collapse of New York's effort to lure Amazon's "second headquarters" to Queens with more than $3 billion in city and state incentives sheds fresh light on a bigger, ongoing corporate subsidy—New York State's Film and TV Production Credit. Read More
The Empire Center, an Albany think tank, released a report in May 2018 that took note of New York surpassing all other states with per-pupil elementary and secondary school spending of $22,366 per pupil as of 2016. The report noted that the Empire State spent 90 percent more than the U.S. average of $11,762, up from 86 percent above average in 2015. The education spending gap between New York and the national average has grown dramatically over the past 20 years, the Empire Center noted. Read More
To those who don’t get north of the city’s suburbs, Cuomo’s talk of an “even” economic recovery across the state may sound fine. But a new report from the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon highlights the ugly facts. Read More
There has been a sharp and growing economic divide between upstate and downstate. Read More
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s economic development programs have been the subject of two federal corruption trials that ended with convictions for two of Cuomo’s former associates. But some say problems with the $9 billion programs go beyond corruption and that the structure of the programs is flawed. Read More
Since taking office in 2011, Gov. Cuomo has doled out more than $10 billion in public funding and tax breaks in the name of economic development — costly giveaways that have resulted in a series of broken promises and boondoggles. Read More
The overarching scandal here wasn’t bid-rigging or the pay-to-play pattern in the developers’ contributions to the governor’s reelection campaign. At the root was a simply awful public policy — corporate welfare on steroids — that neither Cuomo nor most of his critics have definitively renounced, even now. Read More
The Empire Center, a government watchdog group in Albany, calls it the “biggest, murkiest, pork-barrel slush fund Albany (and perhaps any state capital) has ever seen.” The allocation is slipped into the state budget without any explanation from legislative leaders and the governor. Read More