Tag: NY Post

Schumer spokesman: Federal pandemic relief eliminates NYS deficit

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/03/08/schumer-federal-pandemic-relief-eliminates-nys-deficit/

Excerpt:

The $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed by the US Senate wipes out New York State’s projected budget deficit — possibly negating the need for hefty tax hikes or spending cuts, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office said Monday.

“Ok. Thanks to @SenSchumer NYS budget deficit for this year is…..Zero, nada, niete, zilch (NY terms),” Schumer spokesman Angelo Roefaro tweeted.

The American Rescue Plan provides state government coffers with $12.6 billion in unrestricted aid, a measure championed by Schumer, the New York senior senator. The measure passed the Senate in a 50-49 vote and is expected to clear the Democratic-led House of Representatives on Tuesday and delivered to President Biden for approval.

Author(s): Carl Campanile, Bernadette Hogan

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

COVID vaccine czar to face complaint after ‘inappropriate’ calls about Cuomo

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/03/14/covid-19-vaccine-czar-to-be-subject-of-complaint-calling-about-cuomo/

Excerpt:

A longtime lieutenant to Gov. Cuomo — who is now overseeing New York’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout — called around county officials to gauge their loyalty to the governor amid sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, it emerged Sunday.

Larry Schwartz, who formerly held the highly influential position of secretary to the governor, undertook the phone campaign in the past two weeks as more than a half-dozen women have come forward to accuse Cuomo of inappropriate remarks or behavior.

“Last Friday, I had a conversation with Larry Schwartz who reached out to discuss whether I was supportive of the governor,” Democratic Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone told The Post.

Author(s): Carl Campanile, Aaron Feis

Publication Date: 14 March 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

Schumer spokesman: Federal pandemic relief eliminates NYS deficit

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/03/08/schumer-federal-pandemic-relief-eliminates-nys-deficit/

Excerpt:

The American Rescue Plan provides state government coffers with $12.6 billion in unrestricted aid, a measure championed by Schumer, the New York senior senator. The measure passed the Senate in a 50-49 vote and is expected to clear the Democratic-led House of Representatives on Tuesday and delivered to President Biden for approval.

Asked if the geyser of pandemic relief eliminates the needs for tax hikes or spending cuts, Roefaro told The Post, “the statement speaks for itself.”

Roefaro continued, “How NY decides its budgetary policy is a matter for the state legislature and the administration. Our job was to deliver resources to help NY confront and overcome Covid and it’s impacts, including the fiscal impact. And we did that fully and completely.”

Author(s): Carl Campanile, Bernadette Hogan

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

Tensions over vaccine equity pit rural against urban America

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/03/01/tensions-over-vaccine-equity-pit-rural-against-urban-america/

Excerpt:

The U.S. vaccine campaign has heightened tensions between rural and urban America, where from Oregon to Tennessee to upstate New York complaints are surfacing of a real — or perceived — inequity in vaccine allocation.

In some cases, recriminations over how scarce vaccines are distributed have taken on partisan tones, with rural Republican lawmakers in Democrat-led states complaining of “picking winners and losers,” and urbanites traveling hours to rural GOP-leaning communities to score COVID-19 shots when there are none in their city.

In Oregon, state GOP lawmakers walked out of a Legislative session last week over the Democratic governor’s vaccine plans, citing rural vaccine distribution among their concerns. In upstate New York, public health officials in rural counties have complained of disparities in vaccine allocation and in North Carolina, rural lawmakers say too many doses were going to mass vaccine centers in big cities.

Author(s): Associated Press

Publication Date: 1 March 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

Albany progressives are trying to drive away job-creators with a massive tax hike

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/02/28/albany-progressives-drive-away-job-creators-with-tax-hike/

Excerpt:

The Invest in Our New York Act is a package of six bills hiking state taxes by $50 billion a year. 

Numbers out of context are meaningless. Why not raise taxes by $200 billion, or heck, $90 trillion? But in the context of the New York state budget, $50 billion is an ­unprecedented hike. Without the pandemic and lockdowns, the state likely would have taken in $90 billion in taxes this coming fiscal year, meaning the bill’s proponents want to raise taxes by close to 60 percent. 

A sample of the new taxes: first, on high-income labor. A single filer with $1 million in income would see a 23 percent state tax hike, to 8.41 percent, up from 6.85. A filer making $10 million would see a 48 percent hike, to 12.14 percent, up from 8.82 percent. 

Author(s): Nicole Gelinas

Publication Date: 28 February 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

Start apologizing, Gov. Cuomo — and stop the lies

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/02/15/start-apologizing-gov-cuomo-and-stop-the-lies/

Excerpt:

Indeed, it seems to have started as soon as The Post’s Bernadette Hogan first revealed the existence of the deadly March 25 order by asking about it at a press conference weeks later. At that April 20 presser, the gov pretended he’d never heard of the order before. (And never mind that he is tight as a bug with the state hospital lobby, which plainly requested the order if only to clear beds for more urgent COVID cases. Nor that Cuomo is a notorious micromanager unlikely to let such a deadly mandate be issued without his personal signoff.)

It’s at about this point that the state Department of Health suddenly started reporting “nursing home COVID deaths” in a way unique to New York — leaving out residents who died only after transfer to a hospital. This, even as the DOH continued to record the full truth but refused to share it.

Indeed, the Cuomoites stonewalled Freedom of Information Law requests from the Empire Center and the Associated Press for most of the next year — again, starting long before the feds showed any interest.

The state only finally started releasing that info after 1) Attorney General Tish James’ report outlined the basic fact that the nursing-home death toll was 50 percent higher than Cuomo or Health Commissioner Howard Zucker had been admitting, and 2) a judge outright ordered the DOH to comply with the Empire Center FOIL request.

Author(s): Editorial board

Publication Date: 15 February 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

Democrats slam ‘lying’ Andrew Cuomo over COVID-19 nursing home scandal

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/02/15/democrats-slam-cuomo-over-covid-19-nursing-home-cover-up/

Excerpt:

Fellow Democratic legislators in New York weren’t buying Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s explanation Monday as to why he refused for months to release a true accounting of nursing home residents who died from the coronavirus.

Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens), whose uncle died from COVID-19, bluntly said that “all of it is BS” and a cover-up.

“They could have given us the information back in May and June of last year. They chose not to,” Kim said after hearing Cuomo was blaming the Department of Justice probe for delays in releasing the accurate coronavirus death tally of nursing home residents.

Author(s): Carl Campanile and Nolan Hicks

Publication Date: 15 February 2021

Publication Site: NY Post

Study finds smaller cars may be why crashes injure women more

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/study-smaller-cars-may-be-why-crashes-injure-women-more/

Excerpt:

The smaller, lighter vehicles that women more often drive and the types of crashes they get into, may explain why they are much more likely to suffer a serious injury in a collision than men, a new study published Thursday found.

Researchers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group supported by auto insurers, looked into whether there was some sort of gender bias in the research into vehicle crashes or whether body type had anything to do with the injuries.

Author(s): Associated Press

Publication Date: 11 February 2021

Publication Site: NY Pose

GameStop insurgency is just the latest rebellion against ‘the Big Guys’

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nypost.com/2021/01/28/gamestop-insurgency-just-latest-rebellion-against-the-big-guys/

Excerpt:

Writing for The Post this week, Charles Gasparino explained why the little guys got together to buy GameStop: “Mostly, they’re out to hurt the big guys.”

The Big Guys’ problem is that nobody likes them much. From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, they’re deeply unpopular with ordinary Americans, on both the left and the right, resentment they’ve stoked with selfishness, arrogance and condescension. Their solution to this unpopularity has been to use their control over online platforms, and their influence over the government, to silence their critics.

But they can’t stop the signal. No sooner did the tech giants collude to shut down Twitter alternative Parler than a new revolt sprang up somewhere else entirely among stock traders on Reddit. What will it be next? Truck drivers refusing to deliver food to Silicon Valley? Plumbers boycotting “woke” executives? It’ll probably be something cleverer and less foreseeable than that, but it’ll be something. The more the techno-elite tightens its grip, the more Americans will slip through its fingers.

Author(s): Glenn H. Reynolds

Publication Date: 28 January 2021

Publication Site: NY Post