Details aren’t yet settled, but news reports this morning quote Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos as saying the 2013-14 state budget will include $700 million in tax cuts. Other reports and rumors suggest a somewhat smaller amount. Read More
Category: Blog
The New York State and Local Retirement System (NYSLRS) closed its most recent fiscal year with a return of just 5.96 percent — well below the 7.5 percent target rate used to discount its long-term liabilities. Read More
Governor Cuomo* is running TV commercials declaring that his proposed 2013-14 budget features no new taxes — a claim also widely reflected in most news media coverage of the budget. Read More
State Sen. Tom Libous of Binghamton, deputy leader of the Republican majority in the Legislature’s upper house, has been running a campaign commercial that takes credit for working with Governor Andrew Cuomo to enact, among other things, “the largest middle-class tax cut in 58 years.” Read More
For years now, the Senate GOP’s approach to economic growth has been to cook up big pot of targeted tax relief, and then fling the whole one-house package onto the agenda for passage so incumbents can campaign on it. Job creation? We’ve got it covered! Read More
Using public pension funds to help finance infrastructure projects like the Tappan Zee Bridge would be “a bad idea, harmful both to the state’s government employees and its taxpayers,” Professor Edward Zelinsky of Cardozo Law School writes in a provocative op-ed in today’s New York Post. Read More
An alert reader has provided the answer to a question posed on this blog yesterday: how or where did the state’s largest public employee union come up with its estimate that Governor Cuomo’s proposed Tier 6 pension plan will “reduce benefits” by 40 percent? Read More
Despite the not-rosy fiscal status of the county, the Suffolk County Legislature approved the last outstanding contract for county police officers. (In January, Moody’s listed Suffolk County among the municipal bond issuers facing a credit rating downgrade.) Read More