Category: Commentary

With the stroke of a pen, Gov. Spitzer has cleared the way for 60,000 home-based day-care providers to join New York's growing quasi-public-sector labor cartel. And in the process, on the heels of a first-year budget that increases spending at more than three times the inflation rate, he has further undermined his ability to control the cost of government in the Empire State. Read More

Eliot Spitzer's first legislative session as governor ended last week with gridlock on some of his top priorities. But while they couldn't agree on campaign-finance and public-construction reform, Assembly Democrats and Senate Republicans were firmly united in their willingness to pander to New York's public-employee unions. Read More

On the heels of a 14 per cent hike in medical- malpractice rates, Gov. Spitzer has directed his insurance superintendent to form a task force to "confront the fundamental drivers" of high medical-malpractice costs. Read More

With prosecutors in vestigating possible criminal misconduct in former state Comptroller Alan Hevesi's management of New York's $155 billion state pension fund, there's talk in Albany about making fundamental changes in the powers of the comptroller's office. Read More

Instead of permanently cutting tax rates, New York state is borrowing a gimmick retailers use to avoid cutting prices: the mail-in rebate. The Department of Taxation and Finance is inviting homeowners to apply for a property tax discount. Read More

The Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign is running a new radio ad boasting, among other things, that the former mayor "turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion-dollar surplus and cut or eliminated 23 taxes" during his years in City Hall. Read More

Eliot Spitzer was swept into office by a record plurality, surrounded by impossibly high expectations that have already begun to deflate. As if that weren't enough, he was also the first New York governor since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1929 to take office at the peak of an economic expansion - which creates some heightened expectations of its own. Read More

A Spitzer administration plan to add at least 60,000 kids to the state's government-subsidized Children's Health Insurance Program now hangs in limbo in the wake of new regulations issued recently by the Bush administration. Read More