Tag: Taxes and Spending

The new replacement policy, which was tucked into a press release announcing new plate designs, has been criticized as a "revenue enhancer wrapped in a public relations ploy" by E.J. McMahon of the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More

Governor Cuomo’s license plate design contest was a PR ploy masking a nickel-and-dime revenue raiser. Read More

"The 'current' $25 fee was for an optional plate choice," said E.J. McMahon, research director at the Empire Center for Public Policy. "The new fee will be mandatory -- the first time ever.  This is a revenue grab under the guise of a PR stunt. Yes, the plates need replacement.  But they don’t cost $25 apiece to manufacture." Read More

“A little series of mistakes in a program this big can add up to a lot of money in a hurry,” Hammond told The Post. “A quarter of a million dollars is a lot of money. It’s important that the auditors are looking at this and are pointing to things that could be fixed.” Read More

When lawmakers in Albany passed the state budget last spring, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared it “both timely and fiscally responsible.” Timely was true enough. But fiscally responsible? Not so much. Read More

E.J. McMahon, research director at the Empire Center for Public Policy, had presented estimates to the joint legislative fiscal committees earlier this year on the potential consequences of departures. He predicted that if the state lost 10% of residents with median adjusted gross income of more than $10 million, New York would lose $265 million in tax revenue, more than the entire state-funded budget for the Department of Environmental Conservation. (The total state budget is $175 billion.) Read More

When New York's current state budget was enacted, Governor Andrew Cuomo hailed it as "the broadest  and most sweeping" of his tenure, adding that "for the ninth straight year it was both timely and fiscally responsible." "Timely," yes: budget bills were passed by the Legislature just in time for the April 1 dawn of a new fiscal year. As for "fiscally responsible"—well, that's more a matter of opinion. Read More

The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act on its way to enactment in Albany would vastly expand the state government’s power to regulate every corner of New York’s economy in pursuit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet even as it addresses what proponents describe as a “climate emergency,” the bill’s most controversial elements have been postponed until after the 2022 elections. Read More