Tag: Public Finance

Forty-five years ago this month, then-Gov. Hugh L. Carey and the state Legislature passed a landmark law, the Financial Emergency Act, designed to rescue Gotham from imminent bankruptcy. Read More

Governor Cuomo continues to burn while pols in Washington fiddle around the issue of providing more aid to states and localities in yet another federal stimulus bill. Meanwhile, New York State's plummeting revenues still haven't hit their post-pandemic bottom, according to the First Quarterly Update to the state's FY 2021 Financial Plan. Read More

“It’s everything that’s wrong with Albany in one ugly deal,” said Bill Hammond, a health policy expert at the nonpartisan Empire Center who first noticed the budgetary trick. “The governor was able to unilaterally direct a billion dollars to a major interest group while secretly accepting its campaign cash and papering over a massive deficit in the Medicaid program.” Read More

The good news is that despite increasing pressure on both revenues and expenses, Standard and Poor’s has affirmed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s “A” rating, with a stable outlook. Read More

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli appeared at the New School in Manhattan last night to present what his office billed as “A Vision for the Future of Retirement Security in New York. Read More

The Tier 6 pension “reform” enacted by New York last year applies to all state and local employees who join the state Employee Retirement System or the Police and Fire Retirement System after April 1, 2012 Read More

California, with no budget and with its cold, hard cash quickly leaving the building, could soon resort to drafting taxpayers as less-than-volunteer lenders to the state, or worse. Read More

In recent months, states and cities have lobbied for their piece of the bailout pie. Among other requests, they've asked the federal government to support municipal bond markets by directly buying municipal bonds through the new programs that the Tr Read More