E.J. McMahon, the research director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, said the current law works to rein in spending and chided elected officials for posturing after voting for the omnibus bill they are deriding. Both Barnwell and Gianaris voted for the so-called “big ugly” bill. Read More
The Affordable Care Act “has been a multibillion dollar source of money for the New York health care industry,” Hammond said. A recent analysis by the Empire Center shows most Central New York hospitals saw big increases in Medicaid revenues after the Affordable Care Act allowed the state to expand Medicaid eligibility. Read More
Taxpayers can chalk up a victory thanks to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s successful effort to make the property tax cap permanent. The 2011 law, which could have expired in mid-2020, limits the annual growth in property tax levies to 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. The fiscally conservative Empire Center says the 8-year-old law has saved New Yorkers billions of dollars in tax payments. Read More
Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy, said that the state has legitimate reasons for improving the way the home-care program is run and reeling in its fiscal intermediaries. Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank, has repeatedly highlighted the opaque process by which the state Department of Labor calculates prevailing wage in different regions and raised questions about the accuracy of the calculations. The group recently noted that the state “refused to publicly release copies of the construction union contracts and pay scales it uses as the basis for its prevailing wage calculation.” Read More
E.J. McMahon, research director of the conservative Empire Center think tank, also said that while the population of young people increased, it’s unclear how many of those people came back to Buffalo. Some of the gains could be because people stayed, or they could be from refugee resettlement programs, McMahon said. Read More
E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank based in Albany, breaks it down: The state has a 4 percent sales tax, and Nassau and Suffolk each have a 4.25 percent sales tax. Read More
The governor and state Senate would dedicate the revenue for the MTA — but you can bet they’ll count it as their contribution to the agency. (And the Assembly just wants the tax to fund its overall huge boost in statewide spending.) It also means trouble for future MTA budgets, the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon warns, since real estate tax revenues are highly volatile. Read More