As public pension costs continue to rise, straining municipal budgets to the breaking point, New York City Comptroller John Liu has emerged as a stalwart defender of the status quo. Liu doesn’t deny that tax-funded pension costs are exploding; instead, he says the traditional defined-benefit system offers “a better bang for the buck.” Read More
New York City public advocate Bill de Blasio thinks they are, at least to some extent. The advocate's office announced yesterday that it was into the amount of time it takes NYC agencies to answer Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests. At th Read More
You hear a lot of talk about the panoply of problems facing Wall Street, from the Volcker Rule to derivatives regulations to But here's a simple numbers comparison that points up the challenge for Wall Street (and New York). From the New York Ti Read More
“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
Some state Assembly members from communities most heavily damaged by flooding after Hurricane Irene have introduced a bill () that would exclude "emergency expenditures ... necessary as a result of damage to, or destruction of, a school building or s 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