Month: March 2013

For an excellent dissection of how the federal Affordable Care Act will initially affect New York, see this article in yesterday’s New York Post by the Manhattan Institute’s Paul Howard and Yevgeniy Feyman. Read More

Working added overtime to increase retirement benefits—i.e., pension padding or “spiking”—is an old tradition in the public sector, especially among police officers, firefighters and other employees working under contracts that provide them with ample overtime opportunities. Read More

Job growth in New York over the past year fell below the national rate for the first time since the recession, Comptroller Thomnas DiNapoli points out in a report issued today. Read More

Unlike state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, who says he’s still thinking it over, one upstate local official has already concluded that Governor Cuomo’s local government pension smoothingproposal would be a bad deal. Read More

The White House says that if an automatic budgetsequester is triggered in Washington later this week, New York ultimately will lose $275 million in federal aid. Read More

The one promising new wrinkle in the upstate economic development plan unveiled today by Governor Andrew Cuomo is the offer of full (if impermanent) exemptions from state business and personal income taxes, as well as sales taxes, to firms that expand into designated Tax Free Zones at colleges, universities and “strategically located state-owned” properties. Read More