Meanwhile Back in Albany (v28)

Nathaniel Brooks/NY Times photo

With so much focus on how quickly New York's 'trifecta' government got out of the gate this year, it's easy to understand how some recent news may have flown under the radar, but it surely is as important as the legislative agenda we're seeing passed with record speed.

Here's the lede from an Albany Times Union article earlier this week:

New York state is facing an unexpected $2.3 billion shortfall - the most significant in eight years - due to a sharp drop in income tax collections for December and January, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo revealed on Monday.

The governor, who had announced his $175 billion spending proposal for 2020 last month, cast blame on the federal government, attribution the drop largely to the 2017 federal rollback of the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, which he said was designed to penalize Democratic "high-tax" states. "Everything we did economically is right," Cuomo said Monday. "We tightened our belt, we cut taxes, we're creating jobs, and here's a penalty just because we are Democrats."

The article in the Buffalo News started out with this:

Less than three weeks after he proposed his 2019 state budget, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday raised red flags over slipping tax revenues and suggested that some popular items in the fiscal plan, including state aid to schools, could face cuts from what he offered in mid-January. 

Calling the situation "as serious as a heart attack," the Democratic governor said revenues are $2.3 billion below projections for the fiscal year that ends March 31. That is on top of a $500 million revenue dip form personal income taxes that the Cuomo administration recently projected when it put together a budget plan last month. 

And here's how City and State NY presented the news:

The flashy and progressive $175.2 billion executive budget Gov. Andrew Cuomo presented last month just rain into a roadblock earlier this week when the governor and New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced a $2.3 billion shortfall in income tax revenue - on top of the $500 million dip in revenue at the end of last year. Cuomo and DiNapoli both have pointed to the 2017 federal tax law capping how much of their state and local taxes (known as SALT) that income tax filers can deduct from their federal tax liability as a force that caused some of the state's high earners - who contribute a significant amount to the state's income tax revenue - to flee to states with lower taxes. 

Let's take a deeper look.