On this date in ...

A well-dressed woman entered Jackson’s candy store on Maiden Lane in Albany and purchased a pound of chocolate and paid the cashier with a $20 bill, receiving back $19 in change. It wasn’t until Earl Dunne, manager of all the Jackson’s stores in this area, was going through the day’s receipts that he discovered the woman had given the clerk a $5 bill with the number “20” and word “twenty” pasted over everywhere a “5” or “five” was originally printed by the U.S. Treasury Department. 1968: The Rockefeller administration was seriously considering increasing sales and personal income taxes and eliminating the $12.50 and $25 income tax credits to balance the state’s 1969-70 budget. It was also examining the possibility of eliminating the deduction of life insurance premiums in computing the state tax and the hiking of liquor taxes, pari-mutuel take and luxury levies. A budget division official said no decision was expected until the end of 1968 and it was purely speculation to assess the state’s needs for the next fiscal year until exact figures were known about the projected economic growth of the state and its budget requirements for the new year.

1993: Cuts in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s funding to New York state led to a major shift in the state Health Department’s HIV testing policy. Because of the cash crunch, the state claimed it had to cut back and eventually end HIV testing for everyone except poor, uninsured individuals who weren’t on Medicaid. Similar funding cuts had been made in 23 other states. The policy change in New York forced cash-poor, family-planning clinics and other nonprofit health care providers to send HIV tests to private labs, which had a lower standard of confidentiality and charged a higher price than state-run laboratories.