By lopping two years off a tentative decade-long contract withSuffolk County's police union, County Executive Steve Bellone at least has curtailed some of the long-term financial risk the original agreement posed to taxpayers. Read More
Research
The movement of people in and out of New York over the past two decades, including the combined effects of foreign immigration and domestic migration, has produced significant changes in the Empire State’s age profile. Read More
The Obama administration quietly issued a new waiver last month that allows states to change the rules of how success is measured in welfare reform. Read More
Suffolk County's proposed contract with the county Police Benevolent Association, featuring an extraordinary 10-year term, calls to mind the New York Yankees' equally long 2007 deal with Alex Rodriguez. Read More
City governments throughout New York “are stressed and have to work hard to keep their fiscal houses in order,” says a new report from the office of state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Read More
New York’s economy would be hit especially hard by Washington’s potential “Taxmageddon” — the scheduled end-of-year expiration of the Bush income tax cuts and of a temporary “patch” that prevents the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) from hitting more middle-class taxpayers, according to a just-posted analysis from the Tax Foundation. Read More
The Obama administration's offer to waive work requirements for recipients of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) is being opposed by leading congressional Republicans, who have introduced legislation to overturn the action. While state governments generally welcome added flexibility in administering federal programs, there is a risk the new federal policy will be used in some states to undermine the work-first principle at the heart of the successful 1996 welfare reform. Read More
A task force co-chaired by former New York Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch this week reached an "unambiguous" conclusion about the fiscal stresses on state governments: "The basic problem is not cyclical. It is structural." Read More
On July 12th, the Obama Administration announced that it would unilaterally allow states to experiment through waivers with different ways of defining the “work” required of welfare recipients under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. This could be a first step to permanently watering down the “work participation” requirements that were a centerpiece of the 1996 welfare reform law and to backing away from the primary theme of TANF: personal responsibility. Read More
The closing bell on Wall Street last Friday also marked the end of the fiscal year for many public pension funds across the country, including the New York State Teachers' Retirement System (NYSTRS), which finances pensions promised to 420,000 active and retired professional educators working mainly for school districts outside New York City. Read More
Recent trends on Wall Street indicate that public pension funds with fiscal years ending June 30 probably missed their rate-of-return targets for 2012. I delve into one plan in particular — the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System — on the editorial blog at Newsday. Read More
It was Mark Twain who supposedly said “no man’s property is safe when Congress is in session” — a concept that a surely extends to the New York State Legislature as well. In that spirit, here’s something to celebrate on the Fourth of July: the Legislature not only left Albany on schedule June 21, it passed fewer bills this year than in any regular session since 1914, according to an analysis by New York Public Interest Research Group. Read More