START-UP NY, New York’s signature economic development program, made headlines for creating just 408 jobs in its first two years of operations. However, bigger disappointments may lie ahead. Read More
Tag: Taxes and Spending
E.J. McMahon, president of the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy, said music producers and game developers are getting a "very sweet deal" by piggybacking on the film industry's lobbying. Much of the subsidized business was already here, he said. Read More
New York’s $156 billion budget, enacted on April 1, authorizes the state to spend $4,947 per second during its 2016-17 fiscal year, according to the Empire Center’s updated Spend-O-Meter. Read More
Gov. Cuomo’s 2017 state budget, which he’ll present next week, is likely to call for billions of dollars in new spending on highways and bridges. Unfortunately, taxpayers won’t get their money’s worth if the state continues to insist on rigging bids for public-works projects that all but guarantee the jobs will go to unions. Read More
Local government is a labor-intensive business, and employee compensation is the single biggest element of most municipal budgets. The 2014-15 edition of What They Make, the Empire Center’s annual report on public payrolls, allows New York taxpayers to compare this key element of local government costs around the state. Read More
Gov. Andrew Cuomo quietly created the new pot back in 2013 by inserting it into a budget bill. State lawmakers approved it. Each year since then the pot has grown, so that now Cuomo and legislative leaders have given themselves the authority to borrow up to $1.1 billion for yet-to-be-named projects. Read More
Some call it a slush fund for state politicians to use for special projects to curry favor in their districts. It's a $1.1 billion dollar state grant fund that our Greg Floyd first told you about more than a year ago. Now there are new projects and new concerns about what many call a less-than-transparent process. Greg breaks down the numbers and gets two very different opinions on the fund from the two top money people in state government. Read More
The pork may be returning to the state budget. State lawmakers and Gov. Andrew Cuomo quietly have stashed away $1.2 billion for pet projects, and they are starting to spend it: about $187 million for 588 projects across New York, a report from the Empire Center, a watchdog group in Albany found. Read More