Tag: Empire Center for Public Policy

Rudy Giuliani says he regrets not having pension as he faces devastating $148m legal payout

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.aol.com/news/rudy-giuliani-says-regrets-not-194510062.html

Excerpt:

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he regrets not taking a city pension now that he’s facing a $148m civil court payout for defaming a pair of Georgia election workers.

The former mayor has since filed for bankruptcy, according to the New York Post.

Empire Centre for Public Policy, a taxpayer watchdog group in New York, found no evidence of Mr Giuliani ever filing to receive a pension.

Had he applied, he would have been eligible for approximately $26,000 per year once he turned 62.

The former mayor would have an extra $442,000 in his coffers if he had applied for a pension.

When The New York Post asked him why he never took a pension, he suggested he was “giving back to the city I love.”

“Although I would like to take it now,” he added.

The former mayor then admitted that he also didn’t “know how to go about it.”

He also is not receiving a federal pension for the time he spent working as Manhattan’s US Attorney and for other government work he performed.

Author(s): GRAIG GRAZIOSI

Publication Date: 1 Jan 2024

Publication Site: Independent UK via AOL

Biden Administration Sues a City Over “Rampant Overspending on Teacher Salaries”

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.educationnext.org/biden-administration-sues-a-city-over-rampant-overspending-on-teacher-salaries/

Excerpt:

The Biden administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission is suing the city of Rochester, New York, contending that “rampant overspending on teacher salaries” plunged the Rochester school district into “extreme financial distress,” misleading investors who bought municipal bonds.

The legal action is unusual. Sure, the federal government’s interaction with K-12 education has often extended beyond the bounds of the U.S. Department of Education. The Department of Agriculture administers the school lunch program, and the Department of Defense operates schools serving military-connected children. Under George W. Bush, the Justice Department toyed with the idea of using antitrust law to support charter schools. And in the waning days of the Trump administration, President Trump issued an executive order authorizing “emergency learning scholarships” to be provided via the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

But, notwithstanding Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine’s theory that
“everything is securities fraud,” in practice, the K-12 education beat hasn’t intersected greatly with the fraud provisions of federal securities laws. At least until now.

….

How much has Rochester been “overspending?” The website Seethroughny.com, a project of the Empire Center for Public Policy, lists 717 Rochester City School District Employees who earned more than $100,000 in 2019. The district has about 25,000 K-12 public school students, according to the state of New York. Spending runs about $20,000, a little below the statewide average. Whether that amounts to “overspending” probably depends on one’s view of how much the children are learning, and also one’s view of whether the students could learn more, and how much more, if more money were spent.

….

In practice, the legal aspects of the case will probably turn more on considerations about disclosure to potential bond buyers than about the details of the spending on teacher salaries.

Even so, the mere mention of securities law and bondholders as potential tools to curb school district “overspending” is intriguing, especially when the action comes under a president who campaigned promising to increase school spending so as to pay teachers “competitive salaries.” For years, reformers have complained that teachers unions capture school boards and run school systems for the benefit of adults rather than children. Now a different set of influential adults—bondholders—is, in a way, asserting, via the SEC, its own claim that could be a countervailing force.

Author(s): Ira Stoll

Publication Date: 15 June 2022

Publication Site: Education Next

Pray Hochul won’t cave to union calls for a big pension giveaway — at NY taxpayer expense

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2022/03/11/pray-hochul-wont-cave-to-union-calls-for-a-big-pension-giveaway/

Excerpt:

Tuesday will be the 10th anniversary of a state legislative landmark: the creation of a new public-pension “tier” reining in the explosive cost of state- and local-government retirement benefits in New York.

While Tier 6 wasn’t the “bold and transformational” breakthrough touted by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2012, it was a solid net positive for taxpayers, building on incremental changes in the Tier 5 pension reform enacted two years earlier. (Tiers 5 and 6 cover most occupations other than police and firefighters, who belong to other pension plans modified in different ways by the same legislation.)

The reforms have saved billions of taxpayer dollars for the state and local governments over the past decade — including $1 billion this year alone — plus significant added savings for New York City’s separate pension systems.

The state’s well-fed public-sector unions tried to block pension changes at every turn. Now, under the slogan “Fix Tier 6,” they’re pushing the Legislature to roll back pension reform as part of the budget for the fiscal year that starts April 1.

The “fix” sought by the 200,000-member Civil Service Employees Association and other government unions is a return to the state’s enriched pre-2010 pension plans, which (among other sweeteners) required no employee pension-fund contributions after 10 years and allowed for early retirement on full pensions as early as age 55 after a minimum 30 years of service.

Author(s): E.J. McMahon

Publication Date: 11 Mar 2022

Publication Site: NY Post

Tiering Up – The Unfinished Business of Public Pension Reform in New York

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/tieringup/

PDF of report: https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Tiering-Up_FINAL-Copy.pdf

Graphic:

Excerpt:

The Tier 5 and Tier 6 changes combined are saving New York state and local governments outside New York City more than $1 billion this year.

After record-busting investment returns in 2021, most of the state’s public pension plans report they are fully funded—but adjusting for financial risk, their combined unfunded liabilities still total nearly $400 billion.

The traditional defined-benefit pension system remains biased in favor of career and long-term employees, to the disadvantage of those who work shorter government careers.

Author(s): E.J. McMahon

Publication Date: 14 Dec 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center

DiNapoli bolsters pension fund stability—and cuts tax-funded costs

Mary Pat Campbell
DiNapoli bolsters pension fund stability—and cuts tax-funded costs

Excerpt:

DiNapoli announced today that he’s approved a recommendation by the State Retirement System Actuary to reduce, from 6.8 percent to 5.9 percent, the assumed rate of return (RoR) on investments by the $268 billion Common Retirement Fund, which underwrites the New York State and Local Employee Retirement System (NYSLERS) and Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS), of which the comptroller is the sole trustee.

To be sure, even at 5.9 percent, the RoR that the pension fund literally counts on to pay constitutionally guaranteed benefits will remain considerably higher than the yields from commensurate low-risk U.S. Treasury or high-quality corporate bonds, which currently range from 2.3 percent to 3.3 percent. Nonetheless, in isolation, cutting the RoR assumption is an unequivocally good and prudent thing for the comptroller to do.

Assuming lower earnings also tends to result in higher required contributions by employers—which is why politically sensitive public pension fund administrators across the country have tended to set their RoRs at much higher levels than those required for private corporate plans. To guard against volatility in investment returns, which has been especially pronounced over the past 25 years, DiNapoli and other pension fund administrators also resort to “asset smoothing” — i.e., counting average market returns over several years—as a basis for estimating the assets available to pay retirement benefits. In New York’s case, the smoothing period is five years.

Author(s): E.J. McMahon

Publication Date: 25 August 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

Report Reveals Albany’s Balanced Budget a Gimmick

Mary Pat Campbell
Report Reveals Albany’s Balanced Budget a Gimmick

Graphic:

Excerpt:

The dramatic reversal that shrank the state’s four-year budget gap from $38.7 billion in January to the current $3.4 billion occurred, incredibly, despite the Governor and legislature adopting a budget that increases state spending significantly in education and other areas. What turned the tide was a massive injection of federal aid—including $12.7 billion in no-strings federal aid awarded to the state in March under the American Rescue Plan—along with tax collections that defied earlier projections of vast, pandemic-induced revenue loss, and new tax hikes inflicted on high earners estimated to yield $2.75 billion in new revenue this year alone. As a result, the enacted budget financial plan the Governor’s budget office issued last month shows a balanced budget for this fiscal year and next. Even the red ink that starts accumulating in 2024 and 2025 looks manageable.

But looks are deceiving here. Extending the budget window—as does a chart on page nine of the Comptroller’s report, shown below—reveals large, yawning budget gaps growing from nearly $8 billion in 2026 to nearly $20 billion by the end of the decade. The dual expiration of American Rescue Plan funds in 2026 and a temporary hike in the PIT in 2027 sends the budget deep into the red.

Author(s): Peter Warren

Publication Date: 28 June 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

Cuomo Killing the Disabled and the Elderly: This Time It’s Personal

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/cuomo-killing-the-disabled-and-the

Graphic:

Excerpt:

But the other problem, of course, was that Cuomo wasn’t the only governor who sent sick people back into nursing homes. In addition to New York, there was also Michigan, California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Except it seems Cuomo was the only one who had his staff falsify data. So perhaps the others can get away with just admitting they made decisions that were very unwise.

As it is, the New York state legislature is starting an impeachment investigation, and I assume they’re not going to half-ass it like other impeachments we have heard tell of.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 11 March 2021

Publication Site: STUMP on Substack

Biden, Congress about to rain cash on NY state, local governments

Mary Pat Campbell
Biden, Congress about to rain cash on NY state, local governments

Excerpt:

As Governor Cuomo already has pointed out on the state level, the federal stimulus aid amounts to “the ultimate one shot . . . a sugar high.” The highest priority of state and local officials should be to avoid plowing the federal money into recurring spending commitments that will create bigger budget deficits in the future.

In an ideal world, New York pols will embark on a careful, painstaking assessment of needs, weighing short-term relief against recurring long-term benefits. Since most upstate cities are very old, with crumbling physical infrastructures, they would be well advised to invest the bulk of their “Biden bucks” into streets, sidewalks, water and sewer systems. This will save money on maintenance costs—which are high in many of these places. It also will help these cities retain and attract business activity they cannot afford to lose—and were already losing before the pandemic.

Local governments could also consider ways to help small local retail businesses and their landlords, especially restaurants and entertainment venues, which were crushed by the pandemic. One way of doing this might be a property tax holiday, or a long-overdue assessment and equalization update, whose transitional costs could be covered by the federal money.

Author(s): E. J. McMahon

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center

Implications of COVID-19 Mortality Patterns for Nursing Home Regulation in New York

Mary Pat Campbell
Implications of COVID-19 Mortality Patterns for Nursing Home Regulation in New York

Graphic:

Excerpt:

In its January 28 report, the attorney general’s office argued that low staffing levels in nursing homes was associated with higher death rates from the novel coronavirus. As evidence of that connection, the report presented a table (reproduced in Table 1 below) comparing death rates in nursing homes based on their star ratings for staffing from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).[5] It showed that homes with the lowest staffing grade of one star had an aggregate COVID-19 mortality rate of 7.13 percent, compared to 4.94 percent for homes with a five-star rating.

However, that table was based on the limited data available in mid-November, which encompassed 6,645 deaths, only half the number that are documented now.

When that table is brought up to date, it shows no clear association between lower staffing grades and higher coronavirus mortality (see Table 2). Homes with a three-star staff rating showed the largest percentage of deaths, at 13.62, compared to 12.98 for two-star homes and 12.14 for one-star homes.[6]

Author(s): Bill Hammond, Ian Kingsbury

Publication Date: 4 March 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

State budget shaping up as embarrassment of riches—for now

Mary Pat Campbell
State budget shaping up as embarrassment of riches—for now

Excerpt:

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 dramatically improved Albany’s short-term outlook, even as sexual harassment allegations against the governor will complicate negotiations towards a new budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1.

The Consensus Revenue and Economic Forecast issued late last night by DOB splits the difference between the governor’s budget agency, which wasn’t budging from its already improved 30-day amended financial plan outlook, and a very optimistic projection from the Assembly Ways and Means Committee staff, which forecast $5 billion more in revenue through FY 2022. The Senate Finance Committee staff estimate came in a total $3.4 billion higher than the governor’s latest number.

Author(s): E.J. McMahon

Publication Date: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

Empire Center Rebuttal to NY Health Department Pushback

Mary Pat Campbell
Empire Center Rebuttal to NY Health Department Pushback

Excerpt:

“The salient policy question isn’t whether the March 25th memo introduced COVID into nursing homes, but whether it contributed to higher infection and mortality rates.

“The department’s comments show that it either doesn’t understand statistics, or is willfully ignoring our findings. Our analysis does, in fact, show a consistent relationship between transfers from hospitals to nursing homes and COVID fatalities. These findings were robust to several statistical assumptions.

“Our report included a statewide statistical analysis, which showed that transfers were associated with deaths at the 99 percent confidence level. Those statewide estimates are the ones we used to estimate that transfers were associated with hundreds of additional deaths. In digging a bit deeper, we hypothesized a differential effect upstate and downstate, which was then corroborated by our analysis.

Author(s): press release

Publication Date: 19 February 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

COVID-positive Admissions Were Correlated with Higher Death Rates in New York Nursing Homes

Mary Pat Campbell
COVID-positive Admissions Were Correlated with Higher Death Rates in New York Nursing Homes

Excerpt:

The admission of coronavirus-positive patients into New York nursing homes under March 25 guidance from the New York State Department of Health was associated with a statistically significant increase in resident deaths.

The data show that each new admission of a COVID-positive patient correlated with .09 additional deaths, with a margin of error (MOE) of plus or minus 0.05.

Further, admitting any number of new COVID-positive patients was associated with an average of 4.2 additional deaths per facility (MOE plus or minus 1.9).

The effect was more pronounced upstate—possibly because the pandemic was less severe in that region at the time, so that even a single exposure would have had a larger impact on the level of risk.

Author(s): Bill Hammond, Ian Kingsbury

Publication Date: 18 February 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy