August 15, 2026
The Ongoing Battle to Defend Welfare Reform
Welfare reform replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families…
March 25, 2026
Opportunity Book: A New Tool for Connecting Policymakers with Innovative Ideas
Today the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is…
March 27, 2025
The Looming Debt Crisis, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Medicaid
Let’s start with a chart to understand the dire fiscal situation we are in as…
March 24, 2025
Keeping Medicaid Sustainable While Prioritizing the Vulnerable
The unsustainability of future federal budget deficits necessitates reduced entitlement spending. Finding savings from Medicaid…
January 7, 2025
Tax Policy Should Prioritize Shoring Up the Family
During the Biden years, tax policy related to the family revolved around the child tax…
September 11, 2024
Doing Right by Kids: A Book Event
Event Summary On September 11, AEI’s Scott Winship gathered distinguished experts to launch the new…
June 18, 2024
Economic Opportunity and Social Mobility
Years ago, I worked at the Pew Charitable Trusts on something called the Economic Mobility…
May 20, 2024
Indivar Dutta-Gupta and Scott Winship on the 60th Anniversary of LBJ’s “War on Poverty” on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal”
Indivar Dutta-Gupta and Scott Winship talked about the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” speech…
May 16, 2024
Critiquing Bastian (2022, 2023, 2024, and forthcoming): On Child Tax Credit Reform and the Sensitivity of Single Mothers to Work Incentives
In 2021, Congress passed and President Biden signed a major, but temporary, reform to the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Among other reforms to the credit, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) made it available to non-workers on the same basis as workers. Attempts to make this reform permanent foundered, in part, due to opposition from policymakers who worried that the new credit would lead workers to withdraw from the labor force and otherwise discourage work. These concerns drew strength from a working paper by a team of economists at the University of Chicago, published that fall, that predicted that making the ARPA CTC permanent would lead nearly 1.5 million parents to leave employment, most of them lower-income single mothers.
March 28, 2024
An Early Look at the Child Tax Credit Changes in the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024
The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 would expand the child tax credit by increasing the refundable credit, indexing the maximum benefit to inflation, raising the phase-in rate for families with multiple children, and allowing a one-year earnings lookback.
February 27, 2024
Options for Improving the Child Tax Credit Provisions in H.R. 7024, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024
H.R. 7024, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024, passed the…