Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
September 11, 2024
The bill comes with a $500 billion price tag and endorsements from leading Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Moody’s, a major financial services company, has also blessed the act, predicting it will lower rents and significantly boost the supply of affordable housing. But before the country embraces this rosy outlook, it must confront a stark reality: Government interventions in housing…
September 5, 2024
Have populist politics gotten so out of control that politicians believe they need to hurt Pennsylvania’s workers in order to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes? Yesterday, the Washington Post reported: President Joe Biden is preparing to announce that he will formally block Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel, according to three people with knowledge of the…
September 4, 2024
Originally appeared in Newsweek On August 16, presidential candidate Kamala Harris unveiled a series of housing proposals that recycle the same failed strategies that have plagued federal housing policy for decades. Among the key components are subsidies for the construction of 3 million new housing units over four years, as well as a total of $100 billion…
September 2, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris correctly identified one of America’s biggest problems when she said that “there’s a serious housing shortage.” America’s affordable-housing crisis exacerbates wealth inequities, leads low-income parents to live in neighborhoods with less upward mobility and reduces our country’s capacity for economic growth, innovation and adaptation to regional shocks. Unfortunately, her proposed solutions…
August 26, 2024
It’s hard to sympathize with the Parkoff Organization, the New York real estate firm that owns some 4,000 apartments across the city. According to a new lawsuit, housing “testers” caught the group discriminating against potential tenants whose rent would have been subsidized by housing vouchers. The Fair Housing Justice Center (FHJC), which brought the suit, claims that Parkoff…
August 24, 2024
A centerpiece of Vice President Harris’ newly released economic plan is a revamped Child Tax Credit, which would send families $6,000 for each newborn and up to $3,600 for older children, up from the existing $2,000 per child credit. Her proposal follows Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s recent call to increase the credit to $5,000…
August 15, 2024
A recent study confirms that universal basic income—no-strings-attached benefit checks offered to recipients regardless of need or contribution to the program—discourages work. That’s relevant to the presidential race. Kamala Harris has called more than once for paying UBI-like benefits. Participants in the UBI program worked nearly 1½ hours less a week on average, and unemployment rose. Other adults in…
July 14, 2024
When my daughter was 16 and was offered a job as a lifeguard, her boss told her she’d need to have her own bank account in order to be paid. No one gets checks anymore, just direct deposit. So I took her to our local bank branch and helped her open an account. This process…
June 18, 2024
When it comes to education, these have been the best of times and the worst of times. In 2021, Arizona adopted the nation’s first universal education-savings-account (ESA) program. In 2022, West Virginia adopted the second. That trickle became a flood in 2023, with states from Arkansas to Utah to Ohio adopting their own programs. Around…
June 18, 2024
Years ago, I worked at the Pew Charitable Trusts on something called the Economic Mobility Project. In 2009, we commissioned a survey covering opportunity, mobility, and the American Dream. One revealing question we asked was the following: The term American Dream means different things to different people. Here are some ways some people have described…