Category: Media Coverage

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s riposte to Senator Mitch McConnell over the question of a bailout for New York has got to be one of the all-time classics of Democratic Party thinking. The governor, at one of his briefings, lit into the Senate majority leader over his suggestion that states that have mismanaged their budgets should consider bankruptcy. Mr. Cuomo boasted that New York pays more money to Washington than any other state. “Just give me my money back,” he exclaimed. Read More

A 2019 New York Post editorial, “Pensions New York Taxpayers Can’t Afford,” with data from the Empire Center named a retired lawyer for the city’s department of housing preservation and development who qualified for a $434,263 city pension, and three other city retirees earning pensions of more than $300,000 a year. One New York City police officer was collecting a $474,511 a year pension. Illinois is no better. Read More

The government watchdogs at the Empire Center report that double dippers statewide grew by more than 4 percent from July 2018 to July 2019, with at least 43 state and local public employees under age 65 getting new waivers to collect combined public pensions and government paychecks of $200,000 or more at the same time. Seven “retirees” collected combined totals exceeding $300,000. Read More

In the resulting rush to get out of town, Assembly and Senate leaders gave Gov. Andrew Cuomo wide latitude to essentially proceed however he saw fit, leading to a state budge process that E.J. McMahon, research director for the good-government group Empire Center, called as secretive "as I've ever seen in 30 or 40 years." Read More

"So the choice is really, waste the money that way, or do a bill that actually provides funding to New York state. That bill does not even get us a fraction of the amount of money that is needed." Bill Hammond, director of health policy for the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank based in Albany, concurred with Mujica's assessment, noting that these payments would be made quarterly. Read More