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
Category: Commentary
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
After the record jump in Wall Street bonuses early this year, a slowdown in personal-income growth in New York and other finance-intensive states was inevitable in the second quarter. Read More
What does Rep. Charlie Rangel have against his hometown, anyway? Anyone who didn't know better would think the "mother of all tax reforms" unveiled last week by the House Ways & Means chairman from Harlem was designed by rural populists to suck more juice out of the Big Apple. Read More