E.J. McMahon, who served as a deputy tax commissioner in the administration of former Gov. George Pataki and now is the research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank, said STAR has always been about fiscal gimmickry and is going further in that direction. “It would have been a better idea to simply freeze the STAR benefit rather than sneakily convert it into a credit,” he said. Read More
Over half of the 668 school districts seeking voter approval for budgets on Tuesday, May 21 are presenting spending plans to increase property taxes as high as the 2011 property tax cap law allows, according to an analysis released today by the Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
E.J. McMahon, founder of the fiscally conservative Empire Center think tank, said Cuomo has conflated the impact on the rich New Yorkers with how the federal tax reforms affected middle-class New Yorkers. For the most part, New Yorkers saw a decrease in taxes because of the federal changes, he said. Read More
By midnight Monday, more than 9 million New Yorkers will have filed their income tax returns for 2018. And most will then have cause to wonder what the Great New York SALT Panic of 2018 was all about. Read More
The Empire Center has updated its online Spend-O-Meter to reflect the record size of New York’s newly enacted $175.5 billion budget for fiscal 2020. Read More
New York’s new budget — the actual state-government expenditure plan, that is, as opposed to numerous side issues packaged with it — apparently came in close to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s bottom line. Read More
The impending enactment of a permanent property tax levy cap in New York is a truly historic moment. Since its founding in 2005, the Empire Center has identified a broad cap on property tax levies as a top policy priority. Read More
Over the past seven years, New York’s cap on local property tax levies has generated billions of dollars in savings for homeowners and businesses, compared to previous trends. The cap has been especially effective in restraining school property taxes, which have long been the largest and fastest-growing component of New York’s tax burden. Read More