Existing state regulations, along with competitive pressures, assure that health insurers will share much if not all of the benefit of federal tax cuts with their policyholders. Rather than trying to grab the money or dictate how it's spent, lawmakers should let market forces do their work. Read More
Even before Donald Trump became President, congressional Republican tax reformers had been aiming to get rid of or at least tightly curtail the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, that mainly benefits residents of New York and other high-tax blue states. Read More
Gov. Andrew Cuomo began 2018 the way he ended 2017: demonizing Washington Republicans and fulminating against the newly enacted federal tax reform, especially its $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions. Two weeks after his State of the State message, Cuomo devoted a portion of his fiscal 2019 budget presentation to the same subject, pledging again to come up with a plan to restructure the code by shifting from an employee-paid to an employer-paid income-tax system. Read More
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is running for re-election this year and President in 2020, and apparently he thinks his killer app is opposition to the GOP tax bill. Judging by his proposals so far, we’d say this is going to be harder than he thinks. Read More
If the state Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo don't act, some New Yorkers would be on the hook for another $1.5 billion in tax hikes, according to state records and experts. E.J. McMahon, founder of the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank in Albany, Cuomo has called the federal tax law "a missile aimed at the heart of New York, and he’s got his own missile aimed at the same people." Read More
Officials in New York, New Jersey, California, and Maryland are going to the mat against the White House, reworking their tax codes to ease residents’ pain from new limits to federal deductions for state, local and property taxes. E.J McMahon, founder of the fiscally conservative Empire Center, a think tank in Albany, states that this is "the kind of thing that emerges in an ivory tower with not much thought about the practicality." Read More
After many dire warnings about cuts to health care in Washington, it’s worth noting that federal funding for the state’s massive Medicaid program is still on track to go up, not down, in the year ahead. Read More
Does Gov. Cuomo have a beef with the health-care industry — or does he just see it as a well of limitless cash? Read More