New York State's tax receipts in January totaled $11.4 billion—outperforming Governor Cuomo's projections for the month by $1.7 billion, or 17 percent, according to the monthly cash report issued late today by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Read More
Although the state Health has recently revealed significant additional information about the pandemic death toll in New York's nursing homes, it has not fully complied with last week's court order in a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by the Empire Center. Read More
The "state and local recovery" piece of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill now being drafted by House Democrats in Washington would not by itself give Governor Cuomo the $15 billion in added federal aid he's been loudly demanding—but would come very, very close. Read More
New York State's main pension fund investment pool earned 10 percent in its third quarter and has gained nearly 30 percent since the end of its 2020 fiscal year, according to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the fund's sole trustee. As of Decemb Read More
The death toll in New York's long-term care facilities jumped by another 1,516 this weekend as the Cuomo administration adjusted its reporting on adult-care facilities to include residents who died after being transferred to hospitals. Read More
The state Health Department has revealed additional detail about coronavirus deaths in New York nursing homes, showing for the first time how many residents of each home died of COVID-19 outside of the facility, typically in a hospital. Read More
Numbers belatedly released by the Cuomo administration last week pushed New York's COVID-19 mortality rate in nursing homes from 35th to 13th highest in the U.S., an Empire Center analysis shows. Read More
In a letter to governors two days after President Biden's inauguration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that the pandemic-related federal public health emergency "will likely remain in place for the entirety of 2021." Read More
Governor Cuomo’s Executive Budget for fiscal year 2022 authorizes an enormous increase in state-supported debt, all in the form of non-voter-approved backdoor borrowing—and all of it pointedly excluded from the state's statutory debt cap. Read More
The most shocking thing about state Attorney General Letitia James’ report on the coronavirus pandemic in New York nursing homes is what it did not contain: a definitive count of how many thousands of residents have died of COVID. Apparently, not even the highest-ranking legal official in the state was able to pry that elusive number out of the Cuomo administration’s clutches. Read More
The Cuomo administration's resistance to sharing pandemic data from nursing homes has broadened to withholding vaccination numbers as well as full death counts. Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court today kept alive federal litigation that could cost New York a big chunk of the billions of dollars in taxes it collects from nonresidents working for New York-based employers. Read More
"...the Empire Center is the think tank that spent months trying to pry Covid data out of Mr. Cuomo's government, which offered a series of unbelievable excuses for its refusal to disclose...five months after it (the Empire Center) sued, Team Cuomo finally started coughing up some of the records." -Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2021SIGN UP TO READ ABOUT THE ISSUES IMPACTING NEW YORKERS.