About the Organization Excelsior! For the Empire Center for Public Policy (EC), this isn’t just an empty state motto. Excelsior means ever upward, and we live that every day. Since 2005, EC’s team has fought to make New York a Read More
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In a sign of a deepening state budget crisis, the Cuomo administration says it is planning to delay another $2 billion in Medicaid payments this coming spring, according to a recent report from the Budget Division. Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s energy agency issued a stern correction to an October 24 blog post in this space that said subsidies for offshore wind developers could cost ratepayers more than $6 billion. NYSERDA, the state Energy Research and Development Authority, said my calculations (which were based on NYSERDA’s own data) were “incorrect and misleading.” So I went back and double-checked. In one respect, I did make a mistake, explained below—but not in reaching the $6 billion estimate. In fact, the final price tag could climb even higher. Read More
Governor Cuomo has kept his perfect record of consistently ignoring the statutory deadline for issuing a mid-year financial plan update. Read More
Is the city’s biggest bank getting ready to flee? That worrisome question flared up this week following a Bloomberg News report that JPMorgan Chase & Co. — the largest private employer still based in the city — may move thousands of jobs from New York to its other outposts, including in Texas, Ohio and Delaware. In fact, although the bank itself didn’t officially comment, it seems clear the reality is not so dire. JPMorgan isn’t abandoning its ancestral home — not yet, anyway. Read More
The board of the New York State Teacher Retirement System this week voted to reduce the pension plan's assumed rate of return on investments from 7.25 percent to 7.10 percent, which is (a) a step in the right direction, and (b) still unrealistically high. The new projected return assumption, used as the discount rate for calculating and funding long-term teacher pension liabilities, matches NYSTRS' actual return on investments during the fiscal year ended June 30, which fell 0.15 percent short of the previous target. Read More
A Cuomo administration analysis of its own Medicaid rate hike last fall appeared to show a disproportionate benefit for hospitals associated with the politically influential labor union 1199SEIU. Read More
NY's Excelsior Scholarship program is crudely designed, regressive and wasteful. Read More