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
Enrollment in New York State's Medicaid program just topped 5 million, another milsteone for the massively expensive program, the Wall Street Journal Read More
New York’s State Legislature spent $105 million during the six-month period ending last March, according to the latest legislative expenditure data posted at SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s transparency website. SeeThroughNY includes expenditures dating back to October 1, 2006, in what has become the most extensive searchable database of its kind available to New Yorkers on the Internet. Read More