There has also been declining enrollment at New York's public colleges, mainly at its community colleges. At public schools, the 2.6 million students is the lowest in nearly 30 years, according to the Empire Center for New York State Policy. Read More
NY has lost a net 1.4 million people to other states in the 2010s. Where are they going, and what are they earning in their new home states? Based on the latest IRS data, our rollover map offers some answers. Read More
The weak population numbers for upstate continues a pattern that has played out for at least a decade, said E.J. McMahon, research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank. "The rural areas are the weakest," McMahon said. "The upstate decline is continuing. It's not much different from the picture we have been seeing and the same components are causing it: the combination of domestic migration losses in every county but two (Saratoga and Ontario), low foreign immigration and more births than deaths in a lot of rural counties. You put that all together and you have a population decline." Read More
In a turnabout from recent trends, downstate New York’s population decreased twice as fast as upstate’s last year, according to the latest Census Bureau annual estimates. Read More
E.J. McMahon, research director of the conservative Empire Center think tank, also said that while the population of young people increased, it’s unclear how many of those people came back to Buffalo. Some of the gains could be because people stayed, or they could be from refugee resettlement programs, McMahon said. Read More
Cuomo's claims are likely overstating the immediate impact of the deduction cap, said E.J. McMahon, founder of the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank in Albany. It's simply too soon to know if people have fled the state because of the so-called SALT cap, McMahon said. Read More
DiPietro's proposal is one of several just this year to broach the subject. While the conversation seems to come in cycles, E.J. McMahon from the Empire Center for Public Policy believes it's picked up because Upstate lawmakers are frustrated by policy and diminishing influence. "Upstate's representation in the Legislature is primarily comprised of powerless Republicans. Upstate has virtually no representation among the statewide elected officials, again except for the lieutenant governor who is somebody picked by the governor," McMahon said. Read More
Newly revised data from the state Labor Department indicate New York's regional economic performance gap has grown larger in the last year. On a year-to-year basis, the state gained 103,900 private-sector jobs in January—a growth rate of 1.3 percent at a time when the U.S. as a whole was growing by 2.1 percent, according to the state Labor Department's monthly jobs report. Read More