Governor Paterson and state legislative leaders announced today that they've agreed to use most of New York's unfettered federal stimulus money to restore spending to the governor's budget and to avoid any further spending cuts. The result will be Read More
March isn't half over yet -- but we already have a winner! Even with the state budget unsettled (with all that implies, bad ideas-wise), the worst idea of the month is surely a proposal by state Sen. Carl Kruger for avoiding East River bridge tolls Read More
Advocates of a continue to attempt to mislead the public about who pays how much of the current state income tax. Read More
Fitch Ratings just released its survey of big investors' views of the future of various debt markets "going forward." Of the insurance companies, pension and hedge funds, and other asset managers that responded, 12 percent said that the tax-exempt m Read More
Before Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith stalled the plan yesterday, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver had come up with a compromise idea to raise new money for the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority: charge a $2 toll for drivers to cro Read More
Last week, Gov. Paterson wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner asking for a two-pronged federal bailout of the municipal bond market. "The current financial crisis has severely hurt the ability of local governments to borrow," Paterson wr Read More
America's muni-bond market takes criticism from several fronts. Because the market's tax benefits are valuable mostly to high-net-worth individuals, its pool of potential investors is limited. Pension funds, endowments, and other investors already ex Read More
As the projected operating deficit at the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority increases by as much as $650 million, to nearly $2 billion, MTA board members have gone to Albany today to continue their lobbying for the Ravitch plan. The Read More
An enormous income tax hike proposed by some New York lawmakers with backing from a coalition of public-sector labor unions would cost the state at least 22,000 private-sector jobs, according to a new analysis issued by the Manhattan Institute's . Read More
Avi Schick, head of the Empire State Development Corp. for 2007 and 2008, in today's Daily News. He wants to use our taxpayer-guaranteed state and city pension funds to prop up the teetering local construction and commercial-real estate i Read More
"The prospects of an early agreement between [New York City] and its bankers on an economy program ... to avert payroll and interest defaults ... remained doubtful yesterday. "While the city and its bankers, with Governor Lehman sitting in, were str Read More
Macquarie Infrastructure Group, partner in the long-term Indiana Toll Road "public-private partnership," . The document illustrates how much riskier the market perceives such deals to be. The details once again point up the fact, then, that such lo Read More