When Gov. Cuomo won passage of what he described as a “historic” and “transformational” budget early in his tenure, one of the key details he touted was the enactment of a permanent state law capping annual increases in school aid to the rate of growth in personal income. Read More
Governor Cuomo’s 2012-13 budget, to be presented later today, will command media attention for the rest of the week. Advance reports on his modified pension reform proposal are especially promising. Meanwhile, there’s a (fiscally) cost-free approach to helping local governments and school districts alleviate their budget problems: repealing the Triborough Amendment. Read More
Governor Cuomo today confirmed he’s following through on his State of the State promise to ban finger-imaging of Food Stamp recipients, over the objections of Mayor Bloomberg. Read More
The White House says that if an automatic budgetsequester is triggered in Washington later this week, New York ultimately will lose $275 million in federal aid. Read More
The one promising new wrinkle in the upstate economic development plan unveiled today by Governor Andrew Cuomo is the offer of full (if impermanent) exemptions from state business and personal income taxes, as well as sales taxes, to firms that expand into designated Tax Free Zones at colleges, universities and “strategically located state-owned” properties. Read More
The report of Governor Cuomo’s Tax Reform and Fairness Commission is a useful, well researched collection of interesting and provocative ideas — some much better than others. Not a bad place to start a further exchange of ideas leading to a fruitful debate on the topic, assuming such a thing is possible in Albany. Read More
The Pataki-McCall tax commission report unveiled on Long Island today is a decidedly mixed bag.. Read More
The agreed-upon Tier 6 bill restores much of the benefit reduction originally proposed by Governor Cuomo–especially for career employees. Read More