Category: Commentary

Running for a fourth term in 1994, Gov. Mario Cuomo sat on a mid-year budget report that would have called attention to a growing hole in the state budget. It was only after losing the election that Cuomo released the report -- and George Pataki discovered he was inheriting a budget gap of at least $4 billion. Read More

By winning nearly 70 percent of the vote in yesterday's election, Eliot Spitzer set a new record for a New York gubernatorial candidate. Read More

Next year's New York State budget process won't simply be a test of Eliot Spitzer's ability to add and subtract. Above all, it will be a test of the new governor's political will and leadership skills. Read More

Yesterday's state Court of Appeals ruling in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) case is a victory for judicial restraint and common sense. Needless to say, it's also a huge break for Eliot Spitzer: Now he won't have to take office as governor under the shadow of a financially backbreaking judicial mandate. Read More

By the time they lost the House and Senate last month, it had been years since congressional Republicans collectively exhibited the kind of energy, discipline and commitment to principle that produced their most enduring achievement - the welfare-reform law of 1996. Read More

When George Pataki took office as governor in January 1995, New York state was only feebly recovering from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Pataki wanted to jump-start the economy with lower taxes — but he also had inherited a $5 billion state budget shortfall from Mario Cuomo. Read More

Gov. Spitzer won't present his first Executive Budget for another four weeks, but the essence of New York's financial situation could be distilled from three sentences in his first State of the State Address yesterday Read More

Attacking Albany's complicity in "the unchecked growth of pensions" for New York employees, Mayor Bloomberg last week said it was high time the city gained more direct control of its own retirement benefits. Read More