With the stroke of a pen, Gov. Spitzer has cleared the way for 60,000 home-based day-care providers to join New York's growing quasi-public-sector labor cartel. And in the process, on the heels of a first-year budget that increases spending at more than three times the inflation rate, he has further undermined his ability to control the cost of government in the Empire State. Read More
MR. MCMAHON: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming. My name is E.J. McMahon, I'm a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute and Director of the Institute's Empire Center for Public Policy. And on behalf of the E Read More
New York’s recently enacted state budget for 2007-08 includes more than $219 million in appropriations for the state Legislature. At that rate, the New York State Legislature now costs more than $1 million per member — making it one of the best-paid and most expensive legislative bodies in the nation. Read More
Manuel Rivera, the former Rochester schools superintendent who has become Governor Spitzer's secretary for education, is the subject of a new profile on the Manhattan Institute's City Journal website. The author is Peter Meyer, a Hudson- Read More
The state Assembly has issued an official list of 2007-08 "Legislative Initiatives" -- a.k.a. member items, or pork-barrel spending. The list can be downloaded . For the first time in a regular state budget cycle, the list discloses the names of s Read More
In my testimony today, I will not attempt to delve into the many issues surrounding the administration of the real property tax in New York. As this committee's other witnesses will attest, New York's current patchwork approach is both unfair and inefficient. The reliance on numerous local assessment districts, and the lack of a single assessment standard linked to a regular reassessment cycle, are glaring shortcomings of the system as it now exists. Read More
The vagaries of the calendar have extended this year's income-tax filing deadlines to midnight tomorrow, April 17. New Yorkers, especially, can use the extra time to cope with their state's increasingly complex and confusing tax code. Read More
To promote greater public scrutiny of tax-funded expenditures, the Empire Center for Public Policy has assembled a list of pork-barrel "member items" found in the 2007-08 budget bills passed by the Legislature. Read More