EJ McMahon

BY E.J. McMAHON New York’s private-sector job recovery accelerated in March—but remained far behind the national pace on a year-to-year basis, according to the latest monthly figures from the state Labor Department. This analysis was updated April 16 with subsequently

BY E.J. McMAHON Governor Cuomo’s Division of the Budget (DOB) and the Legislature’s fiscal committees have agreed to boost New York State’s revenue projection for fiscal years 2021 and 2022 by $2.45 billion—the latest in a series of upward adjustments that have

BY E.J. McMahon With less than a month to go before the April 1 start of New York State’s 2022 fiscal year, Governor Cuomo has been politically wounded by the allegations of bullying and sexual harassment now being investigated by

BY E.J. McMAHON State tax receipts in the month of December came in $1.4 billion above the latest projection by Governor Cuomo’s Division of the Budget (DOB), according to a cash report released late today by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s

BY E.J. McMAHON Somewhere within that vast fog bank of a FY 2022 Executive Budget that Governor Cuomo began to roll out today is a structural budget gap, opened during the pandemic recession and temporarily obscured by piles of federal cash that

BY E.J. McMAHON The Cuomo administration is quietly extending a temporary freeze on scheduled pay hikes for about 135,000 unionized state government employees and public college faculty members—although the largest affected labor union says it still expects those bucks to

BY E.J. McMAHON New York could be on the way to its first population decline in any decade since the 1970s, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Empire State’s July 1, 2020 population of 19,336,776 was down

BY E.J. McMAHON New York State’s tax receipts in November were a whopping $800 million above Governor Andrew Cuomo’s projections for the month—further evidence that the current-year budget gap is probably much smaller than Cuomo has been claiming. Meanwhile, however,

BY E.J. McMAHON Still struggling to recover from spring pandemic shutdowns, now facing the threat of renewed restrictions due to a second wave of COVID infections, the last thing New York’s economy needs is a state-mandated disincentive to put people back to

BY CAM MacDONALD In light of the state government’s “extremely precarious financial position,” New York’s state lawmakers, judges, statewide elected officials and certain gubernatorial appointees should not receive pay raises in the next four years, a state commission says. “Granting

BY E.J. McMAHON Six months into the novel coronavirus pandemic, New York State’s private-sector employment recovery was the slowest in the 48 contiguous states—and getting slower. The latest monthly jobs report from the state Labor Department and the Bureau of Labor Statistics

BY E.J. McMAHON Forty-five years ago this month, then-Gov. Hugh L. Carey and the state Legislature passed a landmark law, the Financial Emergency Act, designed to rescue Gotham from imminent bankruptcy. The law created the state Financial Control Board as

BY E.J. McMAHON For the better part of three years now, Governor Andrew Cuomo has been pounding SALT — the federal income-tax deduction for state and local taxes. After President Donald Trump signed the GOP-sponsored tax-reform bill in December 2017,

BY E.J. McMAHON Federal income taxes paid by New Yorkers decreased by nearly $3.4 billion in 2018, the first year of the new federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), according to newly released Internal Revenue Service data. The drop in

BY E.J. McMAHON New York’s economy ended the first quarter of this year in virtual free fall, the latest federal data show. The Empire State’s real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased 8.2 percent in the first three months of 2020

BY E.J. McMAHON For a second consecutive year, New York’s population loss was mainly concentrated downstate, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates. During the 12-month period ending last July 1, the 50 counties of upstate New York lost 20,846

BY E.J. McMAHON The final set of pre-pandemic U.S. Census population data for cities, towns and villages provides localized details on a familiar New York pattern: widespread decline upstate, and a few small pockets of growth amid the general stagnation

BY E.J. McMAHON On April 2, with New York’s COVID-19 curve still rising ominously, state lawmakers wrapped up a budget almost unchanged from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pre-pandemic January proposal. With the economy in a coma and revenues crashing, the plan obviously was