As public pension costs continue to rise, straining municipal budgets to the breaking point, New York City Comptroller John Liu has emerged as a stalwart defender of the status quo. Liu doesn’t deny that tax-funded pension costs are exploding; instead, he says the traditional defined-benefit system offers “a better bang for the buck.” Read More
New York City public advocate Bill de Blasio thinks they are, at least to some extent. The advocate's office announced yesterday that it was into the amount of time it takes NYC agencies to answer Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. At th Read More
You hear a lot of talk about the panoply of problems facing Wall Street, from the Volcker Rule to derivatives regulations to But here's a simple numbers comparison that points up the challenge for Wall Street (and New York). From the New York Ti Read More
“First get your facts,” Mark Twain once said, “and then you can distort them as much as you please.” Following Twain’s advice, State Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) have unleashed a fresh set of purported “facts” about New York taxes, in response to my criticism last week of their call for higher state income taxes on households earning more than $1 million a year. Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy says it will ask the state’s highest court to review an appellate decision that would, for the first time in New York’s history, restrict public access to the identities of public pension recipients. Read More
The Appellate Division of Supreme Court in Manhattan—in a three-sentence opinion unvarnished by analysis—has overturned decades of precedent and affirmed a lower-court ruling allowing the New York City Police Pension Fund to keep secret the names of retired officers receiving pension benefits. Read More
Some state Assembly members from communities most heavily damaged by flooding after Hurricane Irene have introduced a bill () that would exclude "emergency expenditures ... necessary as a result of damage to, or destruction of, a school building or s Read More
If there’s one thing the Occupy Wall Street crowd agrees on, it’s that New York should expand its “millionaire tax” on high-income earners. Read More