The new state budget will fund a 35 percent expansion of a murky $1.1 billion pork-barrel slush fund controlled by Governor Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers. Read More
Tag: Budgets
New York's budget for fiscal 2017 includes the state's biggest and broadest personal income tax cut since the mid-1990s. Equally significant, the income tax section (Part TT) of the budget's revenue bill decouples the previously temporary cuts in middle-income brackets, which will now be expanded and extended permanently, from the state's "millionaire tax," which is still due to expire at the end of 2017. Read More
"Spending cap? What spending cap?" In effect, that's the state Assembly's opening public bid in state budget negotiations with Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the fiscal year that starts April 1. Read More
Tim Hoefer talks about the need for transparency in public policy, especially as it relates to pork spending in the NYS budget. Read More
A bill devised by Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, R-Glenville, sets new standards for the disclosure of state budget discretionary funds and how they will be spent. Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to spend $340 million in budget windfall cash on a temporary state tax rebate of Thruway tolls is “an indefensible gimmick,” E.J. McMahon, president of the Empire Center, testified today at a Joint Legislative Budget Hearing in Albany. Read More
“You do have to take this capital plan with a grain of salt,” said EJ McMahon, with the fiscally conservative Empire Center. McMahon predicted the projects, “. . . will happen in a different way and on a different schedule than the governor may have implied.” Read More
Without a hint of irony, Mr. Cuomo proudly compared his “development initiative” to the almost-forgotten titan of government spending, Nelson Rockefeller. Mr. Cuomo bragged that it “would make Gov. Rockefeller jealous.” Read More