Writings

Commentary #32 by Paul Francis

Commentary #31

Commentary #30

Commentary #29

Commentary #28

Commentary #27

This commentary on New York City’s budget deficit introduces an article published in Vital City on February 3, 2026, under the title "Evaluating Mamdani's Diagnosis of New York City's Budget Deficit." The article/commentary points out that, notwithstanding Mayor Mamdani’s expressed surprise that the City was facing a large budget deficit going into Fiscal Year 2027, numerous budget observers in 2025 had identified this looming deficit.

Even a relatively noncontroversial State Executive Budget, which the FY 27 Executive Budget surely is, includes a wealth of important issues to be addressed in the areas of focus of the Step Two Policy Project. Rather than trying to comprehensively review all of these issues, I want to comment today on three such issues in the FY 27 Executive Budget, all of which we have written about in the past.

When New York’s newly elected governor, Hugh Carey, delivered his first State of the State address in January 1975, he famously said, “Now the times of plenty, the days of wine and roses are over.” Gov. Hochul could have begun her FY 27 Executive Budget address by saying, “the days of wine and roses are back.”

This article appeared in Vital City on November 13, 2025.The piece is an excerpt from a longer Commentary called “The Mamdani Mayoralty,” which was posted to the Step Two Policy Project Substack and website on November 10, 2025.

In this Commentary, I want to address two matters: first, how the campaign proposals on affordability of Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo illustrated the divide between the Progressive wing of the party and the “Moderate/Often Technocratic/Traditional Liberal/Establishment” wing, which I describe collectively as “Traditional Democrats.” Second, I want to discuss the threshold challenge Mr. Mamdani will face in implementing his affordability agenda, which is the fiscal conditi

The Back to School season led me to ponder a public policy paradox that has interested me for some time. That paradox is the divergent trajectories of the healthcare sector and the education sector in the United States over the last several decades – especially in the last decade. Healthcare and education arguably are the two most important sectors in American life: both sectors engage nearly every American at some point in their lives, are massive in size, and...

From the standpoint of healthcare in New York State, which is the principal preoccupation of the Step Two Policy Project, the passage into law of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) on July 4, 2025, was highly consequential. What comes next for healthcare in New York is still a puzzle that policymakers and stakeholders are now beginning to confront.

There is an old saw that the United States and Great Britain are “two great countries divided by a common language.”

At the outset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao reportedly said, “It is always darkest before it becomes totally black.”

We have begun Year Two of the Step Two Policy Project. ...

To be successful, New York’s health policies need to support the unique needs of rural communities.

This Commentary builds on two others regarding the controversy about the Cuomo administration’s nursing home policies during Covid-19.

There are two important facts that help account for why these transfers did not measurably increase deaths of nursing home residents ...

Four-and-a-half years after the Covid-19 pandemic began, people are still reckoning with nursing home policy decisions made by NYS officials