The past year has been a roller-coaster for New York’s health-care system, as Congress tried repeatedly to scale back Medicaid and dismantle the Affordable Care Act while allowing other health-related programs to lapse. Because New York depends so heavily on federal health dollars, it had more to lose than almost any other state. Read More
The Cuomo administration has released a few more details of its plan to propose an optional payroll tax for New York employers as a way to preserve some of the state and local tax (SALT) deductions capped under the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Read More
Existing state regulations, along with competitive pressures, assure that health insurers will share much if not all of the benefit of federal tax cuts with their policyholders. Rather than trying to grab the money or dictate how it's spent, lawmakers should let market forces do their work. Read More
The state-mandated hourly compensation of construction workers on New York public works projects generally rose by double the 17 percent inflation rate over the past decade-but most of those added dollars did not boost workers' pay, according to "prevailing wage" schedules for major building trades. Read More
Sign-ups for both government-sponsored and private health coverage through the New York State of Health insurance exchange surged during this year’s open-enrollment period, a sign of continued consumer demand in the face of political turmoil and rising premiums. Read More
Even before Donald Trump became President, congressional Republican tax reformers had been aiming to get rid of or at least tightly curtail the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, that mainly benefits residents of New York and other high-tax blue states. Read More
Renewable energy companies aren’t building the windmills and solar panels Governor Andrew Cuomo hoped for when he pledged in 2015 to have 50 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewables by 2030. Cuomo’s latest solution? The state will build them itself. Read More
Gov. Andrew Cuomo began 2018 the way he ended 2017: demonizing Washington Republicans and fulminating against the newly enacted federal tax reform, especially its $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions. Two weeks after his State of the State message, Cuomo devoted a portion of his fiscal 2019 budget presentation to the same subject, pledging again to come up with a plan to restructure the code by shifting from an employee-paid to an employer-paid income-tax system. Read More
After many dire warnings about cuts to health care in Washington, it’s worth noting that federal funding for the state’s massive Medicaid program is still on track to go up, not down, in the year ahead. Read More
Governor Cuomo's budget proposal includes more than $1.5 billion in automatic income tax hikes, affecting many of the same people who have the most to lose from the new federal limits on state and local tax (SALT) deductions. Read More
Facing a multibillion-dollar gap in state finances, Governor Cuomo has turned to one of Albany’s favorite piggy banks: the health care industry. Read More
For the time being, at least, Governor Cuomo's 2018-19 Executive Budget left a pile of loose ends in the state tax code. With one notable exception, the initial version of the budget doesn't address any of the myriad corporate and personal income tax (PIT) conformance issues raised by passage of the new federal tax law. Instead, those issues are to be explored in a study released by the Department of Taxation and Finance, for consideration during the 30-day amendment period. Read More