While New York State’s new property tax cap has a starting point of 2 percent (or the prior year’s average inflation rate, whichever is less), it will vary from school district to school district based on a series of exclusions for capital expenditures, increases in pension costs, and physical additions to the district tax base... Read More
The state pension fund gained about 10.4 percent on its investments during the recently ended 2012-13 fiscal year, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced today. The latest gain is comfortably above the pension fund’s 7.5 percent target rate of return. Read More
New York State’s Common Retirement Fund, which underwrites state and local pensions, returned a negative 0.92 percent on its assets during the quarter ending June 30, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli just announced. That would translate into a loss of about $1.2 billion on an asset base of roughly $148 billion. Read More
Governor Cuomo’s office has issued a press release boasting that the state Department of Financial Services has turned down $500 million in proposed private health insurance premium increases. But here’s the thing: New York State is also imposing more than $4 billion a year in taxes and assessments on private health insurance, mainly to subsidize Medicaid and other public insurance programs through the Health Care Reform Act (HCRA) budget. Read More
Senate Republicans today unveiled some new proposed personal income tax (PIT) adjustments that would generate savings for middle-class families.* For a couple with income of $70,000 and two children under 17, the potential annual tax cut from the proposed Family Tax Relief Act would appear to come to roughly $700... Read More
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has jumped on the bandwagon in favor of raising New York City’s top resident income tax rate — just a day after two undeclared 2013 mayoral candidates, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and then-City Comptroller William Thompson stepped (somewhat gingerly) off it. Read More
Rising debts and liabilities for pensions and retiree health care could soon translate into higher borrowing costs for at least nine New York local governments, including a half dozen of the largest counties and towns in the state. They’re facing possible bond rating downgrades as part of a nationwide review of local ratings by Moody’s Investors Service. Read More
When Gov. Cuomo won passage of what he described as a “historic” and “transformational” budget early in his tenure, one of the key details he touted was the enactment of a permanent state law capping annual increases in school aid to the rate of growth in personal income. Read More