Month: February 2013

A post on this blog three days ago passed along statistics interpreted here to mean that New York “is leading the nation in private and public jobs lost to layoffs.” But that passage turns out to have been seriously misleading, to say the least. Read More

Public employee unions can’t invoke the Triborough Amendment to preserve old pension plans that did not require employee contributions, the state Court of Appeals held in two cases this week. The rulings, favoring management in the cities of Yonkers and Oswego, were a solid win for taxpayers. Read More

From New York’s standpoint, the best that can be said of last week’s federal tax hike is that it could’ve been worse. Taxes on the wealthy went up, but “wealthy” was defined as an adjusted gross income starting around $500,000 for married couples, instead of at the $250,000 level favored by President Obama. At least 150,000 New York state households, including small business owners, were thus let off the rate-hike hook — for now, at least. Read More

Kathy Marchione, 58, “retired” as Saratoga County Clerk before taking office as a state senator this year. That reportedly qualified her to start collecting a $66,000 pension—the equivalent of a job paying over $70,000 a year, after adjusting for the fact that pensions are not subject to payroll or state income taxes. Which is not too shabby, considering the average private sector pay in the Capital Region was just over $43,000 as of 2011... Read More

Governor Cuomo’s proposed two percent cap on interest arbitration awards to police and firefighters unions was stripped from the final Article 7 budget bill dealing with Education, Labor and Family Assistance issues. At the same time, the Senate and Assembly majorities were unable to get the governor to agree to their preference for a straight four-year extender of the arbitration law, which expires June 30. Read More

President Barack Obama’s proposed federal budget revives his proposal to cap the value of itemized income tax deductions for the highest-earning 3 percent of taxpayers, a category starting at $200,000 of taxable income for single filers and $250,000 for married filers. Read More