December 3, 2024
Avoiding an Unemployment Loan Bailout
Taxpayers in most states may have dodged a billion-dollar bullet on election day. That is, if the outcome had been different, liberal lawmakers would have been uniquely positioned to bail out California and New York unemployment benefit debts, and in the process shift large costs onto taxpayers in other states. All states levy payroll taxes…
November 20, 2023
The Next Time States Are “Swimming in Money” Make Them Repay Their Federal Loans
The pandemic was full of firsts, including the first time states received hundreds of billions of federal dollars they could use to shore up their depleted state unemployment insurance (UI) programs. The March 2020 CARES Act provided $150 billion in a flexible “Coronavirus Relief Fund,” whose potential uses included covering states’ “unemployment insurance costs.” Then the March 2021 American…
June 7, 2023
How ‘Negativity Bias’ Skews the Conversation About Artificial Intelligence
Just as I was preparing an article titled “Calm Down About Artificial Intelligence”—one in a series—Marc Andreesen has preempted me with an 18-page blog post inventorying the main threads in the “AI doom-loop” and why these concerns are either wrong or substantially overblown. In fairness, Andreesen is open to the criticism that he is engaging in…