Looking ahead to the first budget of his administration, Governor Spitzer pledged earlier this month to "make hard choices and begin to fundamentally reform and restructure programs that have become needlessly expensive" and to "say ‘no' to budget requests we simply cannot afford." Read More
While labor union rolls continue to shrink across the country, the latest federal statistics show that New York State's union membership rate--at nearly a quarter of the total workforce--remains more than double the national average.Nearly Read More
In a prelude to next week's budget message, Gov. Spitzer today delivered what was billed as a major address on health care reform. The real importance of the was encapsulated in its title: "Patients First." What the governor described Read More
As Governor Spitzer plans to take on the problem of rocketing Medicaid spending on the elderly, he needs to get his focus right. In his recent State of the State address, Mr. Spitzer spoke of shifting spending away from expensive institutional car Read More
Attacking Albany's complicity in "the unchecked growth of pensions" for New York employees, Mayor Bloomberg last week said it was high time the city gained more direct control of its own retirement benefits. Read More
On the heels of new Census data showing the Empire State lost nearly a quarter-million residents within the past year, a major moving company says New York was one of the nation's leaders in "outbound" moves during 2006. In its , United Van Lines Read More
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