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News coverage of Gov. Eliot Spitzer's first State of the State message invariably highlighted his proposal for what has been widely billed as a $6 billion property tax reduction. . . Read More

Notwithstanding the headlines generated by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's State of the State address, it takes some creative arithmetic to call the new governor's property tax initiative a "$6 billion tax cut." In fact, strictly speaking, Spitzer isn't proposing a tax cut so much as a tax shift. Read More

Gov. Spitzer won't present his first Executive Budget for another four weeks, but the essence of New York's financial situation could be distilled from three sentences in his first State of the State Address yesterday Read More

Long plagued by an exodus of its residents, New York in the past year lost nearly a quarter-million people to other states. But while an influx of foreign immigrants and a ''natural'' gain from births over the past six years has offset the state's po Read More

Long plagued by an exodus of its residents, New York in the past year lost nearly a quarter-million people to other states. But while an influx of foreign immigrants and a ''natural'' gain from births over the past six years has offset the st Read More

Nearly a quarter-million people left New York for other states in the past year, continuing a long-term trend in which the Empire State has been a leading demographic loser. Read More

When George Pataki took office as governor in January 1995, New York state was only feebly recovering from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Pataki wanted to jump-start the economy with lower taxes — but he also had inherited a $5 billion state budget shortfall from Mario Cuomo. Read More

By the time they lost the House and Senate last month, it had been years since congressional Republicans collectively exhibited the kind of energy, discipline and commitment to principle that produced their most enduring achievement - the welfare-reform law of 1996. Read More