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“First get your facts,” Mark Twain once said, “and then you can distort them as much as you please.” Following Twain’s advice, State Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) have unleashed a fresh set of purported “facts” about New York taxes, in response to my criticism last week of their call for higher state income taxes on households earning more than $1 million a year. Read More

The Appellate Division of Supreme Court in Manhattan—in a three-sentence opinion unvarnished by analysis—has overturned decades of precedent and affirmed a lower-court ruling allowing the New York City Police Pension Fund to keep secret the names of retired officers receiving pension benefits. Read More

Enrollment in New York State's Medicaid program just topped 5 million, another milsteone for the massively expensive program, the Wall Street Journal Read More

State comptroller Tom DiNapoli has on Wall Street out, and it isn't pretty. One piece of information shows just how New York -- City and State -- grew dangerously dependent on an ever-growing Wall Street over the past three decades. In 1981, b Read More

In response to the Occupy Wall Street protest, a pair of Democratic state lawmakers from New York City is repeating some flagrantly inaccurate data about taxes in New York State. In an at Huffington Post, Senator Daniel Squadron of Brooklyn Read More

Someone asked Mayor Bloomberg what he thinks of Occupy Wall Street, and : What they're trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city. They're trying to take away the tax base we have because none of this is good fo Read More

Nicole Gelinas has in the New York Post today on the sinking fortunes of New York City's financial sector.  Her message: Thanks to Washington’s support for big banks, New York City has been a cocoon of prosperity compared to Read More

"Down with bankers!" No, that's not the sound of the Zuccotti crowd protesting, but the sound of New York employers slashing their payroll, according to the city budget office's "." Between the 2007 peak and mid-2010, New York's financial indus Read More

Now that the state Public Employees Federation (PEF) has rejected a proposed contract, Governor Andrew Cuomo is moving forward with 3,500 layoffs.  Or, then again, . Tin the Albany Times Union suggests there is an 80 percent likelihood t Read More

The Local 100 Transport Workers Union (most of them work at the MTA) will join the "Occupy Wall Street" protest today at 4:00 in Zuccotti Park downtown. There's a bit of an irony in the location. The park is named for John Zuccotti. Zuccotti is . Read More