New York state continues to lag the nation in job recovery but creating the new profession of “career criminal” is not the answer. Crime across the state, and particularly in New York City, has become completely entrenched in our daily lives. While the Assembly Minority Conference continues to push our counterparts and Gov. Kathy Hochul to do something about it, there seems to be no real progress on the issue as we move through 2023.

 A recent report in the New York Times indicates that last year nearly one-third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City featured the same 327 individuals. According to the report, those individuals accounted for a whopping 6,000 arrests. This is proof-positive this state’s criminal-justice policies are not working, and the victims of these thefts are clearly an afterthought to the legislators who have allowed this to go on.

 In order to combat this unprecedented failure of public protection, Assemblyman Mike Reilly (R,C– Staten Island) has introduced legislation (A.5029) to increase penalties for persistent offenders. The bill would give district attorneys the power to consider the aggregate value of petit larcenies from up to 18 months after the first conviction in order to enforce stricter penalties. If that value is between $1,000 and $3,000, district attorneys would be allowed to charge an individual suspected of the thefts with “grand larceny in the fourth degree.”

 Solving this problem seems straightforward and non-partisan. Individuals who feel emboldened and entitled to take other people’s property need to face real consequences. Eliminating those consequences, as Democrats have insisted upon, enables criminals to keep breaking the law. By returning our criminal-justice system to one of accountability, we will no longer be forced to endure the relentless assault on our communities brought by criminals acting with near immunity.

 For a state that consistently ranks at or near the bottom for outmigration, the issues of crime and quality of life need to take a greater priority. Providing law-enforcement agencies with the tools they need to hold repeat offenders accountable is a reasonable first step. Judicial discretion and discovery reform are reportedly part of state-budget negotiations, and I hope those measures are addressed. However, more needs to be done, and I implore my counterparts to consider criminal-justice changes that go beyond the measures being discussed in the state spending plan.

William (Will) A. Barclay, 54, Republican, is the New York Assembly minority leader and represents the 120th New York Assembly District, which encompasses all of Oswego County, as well as parts of Jefferson and Cayuga counties.

There is a lot of discussion in Washington, D.C.  these days on what to do about the federal deficit. It continues to grow, and House Republicans in particular have made addressing it a key part of their agenda.

Early on, the House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, told his caucus that it would get a chance to vote on a 10-year pathway to a balanced budget at some point this year. More recently, though, GOP leaders have downplayed that expectation, instead arguing that they should focus on how to keep spending down as a short-term goal. And rank-and-file members are weighing in with their own plans, hoping to gain traction in the splintered GOP caucus. None of this, though, considers the rough sledding that Republican-favored proposals will face in the Democratic-led Senate, let alone negotiations with the White House.

While a balanced budget remains a potent talking point for many politicians, as well as for voters who worry about the impact of growing deficits, there’s a reason that coalescing around a plan to make significant budget cuts — let alone reach a balance between federal revenues and expenditures — has proven so difficult. That’s because it’s not just brutally hard to achieve but may be politically impossible. Especially if, as both Democrats and Republicans have declared, cuts to Social Security and Medicare and possibly defense are off the table.

To understand why this is, I found a New York Times article from the beginning of March quite helpful. In it, Alicia Parlapiano, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Josh Katz — reporters and graphics experts — lay out what it would take to reach a balanced budget in 10 years.

 For starters, they point out, taking things off the table — tax increases, say, or cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or the military — makes things exponentially more difficult. If all of those were to be considered non-starters, then balancing the budget would require cutting everything else by 70 percent. That’s everything from food assistance to retirement benefits for the military to transportation and agriculture subsidies and spending on law enforcement and education. “Cuts of that magnitude,” the trio write, “would mean the firings of most federal workers in agencies like the FBI, the Parks Service, and the State Department, and huge reductions in food assistance and military retirement.” It’s hard to imagine something like that could get through Congress.

But that, of course, means that tax increases and changes to Social Security, Medicare, and military spending would need to be part of budget discussions. And every one of them is politically tricky.

 This hasn’t stopped Republicans in Congress from making a stab at it. The Republican Study Committee, which gathers together most of the GOP caucus in the House, has a plan that relies on deep cuts to Medicaid and other non-defense spending, along with raising the Medicare eligibility age over time to 70, doing the same with Social Security, and reducing Social Security payments to higher-wage earners. The House Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, has its own plan, which involves capping spending at 2022 levels for the next decade, instituting new work requirements for welfare recipients, requiring a congressional okay on all major federal regulations, and other changes.

 If you try to look at the issue in a non-partisan manner, it doesn’t appear any more palatable. The Times article notes that the Congressional Budget Office has a list of more than 100 steps that could make a meaningful dent in the deficit. These range from increasing payroll taxes or creating a new tax on consumption to eliminating itemized tax deductions altogether to deferring spending on military hardware and eliminating some agriculture programs. Each would spark a pitched congressional battle.

 My point here is not to say that a balanced budget, or even significant steps to cut the deficit, is impossible. But as members of the House and Senate and President Biden stake out their positions and then get deep into negotiations, it will help to understand why those negotiations are likely to become tense and difficult. The budget, after all, is the blueprint for how the government affects life in the U.S. Everyone wants to balance it — but taking serious steps in that direction will require true sacrifice.      

Lee Hamilton, 91, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.