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July 17, 2025

Even after the One Big Beautiful Bill, Loopholes Allow Illegal Alien Adults to Receive Welfare and Other Benefits

One major set of policies Republicans touted in their One Big Beautiful Bill (now officially Public Law 119-21, signed on July 4, 2025) sought to end government benefit payments to illegal aliens. But while the new law advances that agenda, such as by preventing illegal alien parents from receiving federal Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments,…

July 17, 2025

Reasonable Panic

Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick is quietly launching the next wave of food automation through his new venture, CloudKitchens. He recently revealed a 60-square-foot machine that assembles 300 custom bowls per hour, cutting labor costs by as much as 60 percent. The system handles everything from ingredient dispensing to delivery handoff. And this is just the beginning. Kalanick envisions…

July 16, 2025

An Analysis of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Effect on Student Loans

Key Points  Introduction At the beginning of July, President Donald Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), a comprehensive package of reforms to taxes and government spending.1 While the package touches on myriad policy areas, it includes a comprehensive set of reforms to the federal student loan program. These represent some of…

July 9, 2025

Housing Plan Falls Short

This op-ed was originally published in Your Observer. You can read the whole piece here. Recently, the Florida Housing Coalition, along with the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, Barancik Foundation, Patterson Foundation and the Community Foundation of Sarasota released a Sarasota Housing Action Plan diagnosing the county’s housing crisis and recommending some approaches to fixing it.  The report…

July 3, 2025

A Republican Bailout for Blue Cities? The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Trap Explained

The Republican Party’s much-touted “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” includes a $14 billion bailout for some of America’s worst-run cities, all thanks to the proposed expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Doing so would funnel billions more into a program that props up a fundamentally broken housing system without adding the new supply desperately needed…

July 2, 2025

Have You Heard the Good News?

A quick look at some recent headlines shows that we have problems. The nation sharply and angrily divided along political lines. Rioters in the streets of Los Angeles. A destructive trade war. Debt and deficits at unsustainable levels.    Those are real and serious problems (and not close to an exhaustive list). But the tenor of…

July 2, 2025

Holding Colleges Accountable: From Graduation to Gainful Employment

Event Summary On July 2, USA Today education reporter Zachary Schermele moderated a web event with AEI Senior Fellow Beth Akers and Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. This week, the Senate passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which contained several provisions regarding…

July 2, 2025

Congress Could Rein In Graduate Student Loans

Congress is on the verge of eliminating Grad PLUS—the program which extends effectively unlimited taxpayer-funded loans to graduate students—and imposing caps on graduate loans for the first time since 2006. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a budget reconciliation bill ending the program, which has fueled tuition hikes, exploded student debt, and padded the budgets of wealthy universities….

July 1, 2025

Irresistible Force, Meet the Immovable Object

Some important new numbers are out on the future of the US labor supply, highlighting how a confluence of factors—demographic aging, economic growth, and restrictive immigration policy—are conspiring to create historically tight labor markets in the coming years. The impacts of these trends on businesses and consumers will be pervasive, difficult to manage, and annoying. Americans, I…

July 1, 2025

More Information Sharing Means Fewer Taxpayer Losses to Fraud

Last month, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) introduced a resolution of inquiry objecting to the Trump administration’s development of a “centralized database” that “compiles American citizens’ personal information across federal agencies and departments.” The resolution states that personal information includes “confidential taxpayer, identity, wage, child support, bank account, student loan, health, medical, financial, or other information.” Left unsaid…