The Empire Center’s Explore Your State Budget app has been updated to reflect the state’s mid-year financial report for fiscal 2014.
This online database of New York state budget information, which is accessible through the Center’s SeeThroughNY website, includes actual results, estimates and projections for major spending and tax categories from 2012 until fiscal 2017. Additionally, the tool contains annual disbursements dating back to 1984 and tax receipts since 1976.
“Our state budget app gives New York taxpayers a handy tool for tracking how the state raises and spends their money,” said E.J. McMahon, the Empire Center’s president. “It will be useful to anyone who wants to analyze budget trends and choices in the run-up to the next Executive Budget presentation in January.”
Historical spending and tax data are presented both in nominal and inflation-adjusted terms. In addition, data can be downloaded and saved in spreadsheet form.
Here is a small sampling of important budget trends revealed by the Explore Your State Budget database:
• As of fiscal 2014, the state’s Medicaid caseload stands at 5.2 million – up nearly 600,000 recipients, or 13 percent, in the past two years. The financial plan projects that another 1 million recipients will be added to the Medicaid caseloads by fiscal 2017.
• State aid to K-12 public schools has risen by $1.6 billion, or 8 percent, in the past two years, and under current law is projected to rise another $2.8 billion, or 13 percent, over the next three years.
• New York’s total state tax collections have risen $11.7 billion, or 20 percent, since hitting a post-recession low in fiscal 2010. This includes a $7.7 billion increase in the state’s largest revenue source, the personal income tax, which in fiscal 2014 is expected to raise nearly twice as much as it did in 2003.
The direct web address for Explore Your State Budget is http://seethroughny.net/nysbudget/#.
Learn more about the Empire Center and its efforts to make New York a better
place to live and work by visiting www.empirecenter.org.
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