Bill Hammond with the fiscal watchdog group the Empire Center said that’s an irresponsible practice. “I think everybody would admit it’s a gimmick,” Hammond said. “You don’t have enough money in your checking account to pay your bills and so you just tell the people who are expecting money, ‘You have to hang on for a few days until my checkbook replenishes.’ ” Read More
“It’s everything that’s wrong with Albany in one ugly deal,” Bill Hammond, a health policy expert at the fiscally conservative Empire Center, told The Times. Read More
But according to the Empire Center, a non-profit group based in Albany, the overall impact of the Trump tax cuts actually benefited most state residents. Read More
Earlier this year, another fiscal watchdog group, The Empire Center, found that Cuomo’s budget office had delayed a $1.7 billion Medicaid payment from the previous fiscal year into the current fiscal year. Because of the delay, the governor was able to keep within a self imposed 2% yearly spending cap. Read More
“It’s everything that’s wrong with Albany in one ugly deal,” says Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. Cuomo funneled cash “to a major interest group while secretly accepting its campaign cash and papering over a massive deficit.” Read More
Six-figure pensions are becoming the norm among retirees from New York’s largest downstate suburban police departments, according to data posted at SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s transparency website. Read More
A federal judge’s decision Monday to toss Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s lawsuit over the federal cap on the state and local-tax deduction had to be — as the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon put it — “among the least surprising” rulings of the year. The suit, after all, was patently bogus from the start. Read More
“It’s everything that’s wrong with Albany in one ugly deal,” said Bill Hammond, a health policy expert at the nonpartisan Empire Center who first noticed the budgetary trick. “The governor was able to unilaterally direct a billion dollars to a major interest group while secretly accepting its campaign cash and papering over a massive deficit in the Medicaid program.” Read More