New York Politicians Are Repeating Old Mistakes

Fifty years ago, New York City was broke—buried in debt and spending far beyond what its revenue base could support. The crisis triggered a bruising period of layoffs, budget cuts, and fiscal controls that, with the help of economic growth in the early 1980s, ultimately restored balance to city finances. As E. J. McMahon recounts in our Spring 2025 issue, that brush with bankruptcy forced city government to reckon with limits—for a time, at least.

Today, that sense of limits has all but vanished. “The elected officials who nowadays dominate city hall and Albany exude a sense of fiscal entitlement and economic invulnerability, an aversion to any suggestion of limits on government ambitions,” writes McMahon.

Successive waves of spending, borrowing, and expanded entitlements have put New York on a familiar trajectory. “In short, New York City is poised for another epic fiscal fall,” argues McMahon. “A moderately severe recession is all it would take to push it over the edge. This time, the climb back to fiscal stability could be considerably more difficult.”

New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act is getting closer to reaching Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk, marking the first time that an assisted-suicide bill has cleared one of the state’s legislative chambers. If passed, it would allow patients to request a lethal drug if they have “an incurable and irreversible illness or condition” that gives them six months or less to live.

Read John Ketcham’s take on why the bill is such a discouraging turn in the state’s approach to end-of-life care.

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control created a metric called the Social Vulnerability Index, intended to measure a county’s likelihood of suffering adverse consequences from natural disasters or other emergencies. It is based on four categories: socioeconomic status; household characteristics; racial and ethnic minority status; and housing and transportation type.

Thomas Kelly argues that including race in the formula is absurd. “Because it weighs each of the four ‘vulnerability’ categories equally, an area composed entirely of white, poor, disabled seniors is considered less ‘vulnerable,’ and therefore less deserving of disaster relief, than an area composed entirely of nonwhite, wealthy, young, and able-bodied residents,” he writes.

Can elite universities like Harvard remain at the forefront of research if they can no longer access the federal dollars they have long relied on?

That’s the question Neeraja Deshpande poses in her latest piece, where she notes there’s a real chance we see universities in red states catch up in their recruitment of faculty (especially if funding is redirected to them).

“Blue-state institutions therefore face a choice,” she writes. “They can use the Trump administration’s wake-up call as an opportunity to rethink their failed ideology, or they can continue to cling to these ideas.” If they take the latter route, they could lose ground in the research areas that once made them great.

Read her take here.

“In the name of Democracy, western socialists have rejected all democratic values and norms. Just a reminder that socialism is incompatible with representative democracy.”

Photo credits: Keith Torrie/NY Daily News/Getty Images