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March 18, 2025

Poorly Defined: Reforming the Poverty Line | POLICY LENS

Ever since President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty” in 1964, the US Safety Net has been remarkably effective in reducing the number of Americans living in poverty; but measuring the magnitude of that success is not so straight forward. AEI’s Kevin Corinth explains that defining poverty is largely a decision of society,…

March 17, 2025

Trump Should Put an End to Rent Control

We are in a time when what would have seemed to be unimaginable domestic policy changes — from the abolition of the Department of Education to cutoffs of federal support for universities — are on the table.  The Department of Housing and Urban Development is involved in this creative destruction — having pulled back a Biden-era program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which tied federal assistance for…

March 14, 2025

A Historic Opportunity for Higher Education Reform 

Once a sleepy policy area on the national scale, higher education is now a central issue making headlines in the overall political discourse.   Believe it or not, the education policy divides between mainstream Democrats and Republicans used to be trivial. For example, 10 years ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) proposal to lower student loan interest rates to 3.9…

March 13, 2025

Two Charts Show Why a Trade War Over Fentanyl Doesn’t Make Sense

Following a month-long pause, President Trump last week reimposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, only to pause many of them again two days later. Different reasons have been offered by the Trump Administration for the tariffs, but in recent days the President’s advisers have honed in on one reason in particular: Fentanyl is being shipped across our borders with…

March 13, 2025

Trends in Net College Tuition and Financial Aid, 1990–2020

Key Points  Introduction College costs are out of control—or so the narrative goes. In recent years, a counternarrative has emerged that argues, correctly, that the meteoric rise in the sticker price of college is misleading. Net college tuition, or tuition after financial aid is applied, has risen far less quickly than sticker price tuition and…

March 13, 2025

Housing Roadblocks: Paving a New Way to Address Affordability

Thank you, Chairman Scott and ranking member Warren. Thank you, committee members. I am gratefuland honored to have the opportunity to speak to you today. I am an economist who has spent much of the last quarter-century studying what has gone wrong withAmerica’s housing markets. Initially, I worried mainly about the high costs and limited…

March 11, 2025

An Evaluation of Cost Saving Reforms of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

AbstractCongress is considering ways to reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by $230 billion over ten years. Reforms are likely to include one or more of the following cost-saving elements: reducing the maximum SNAP benefit, reducing deductions, expanding work requirements, and ending broad based categorical eligibility. In this paper I analyze each…

March 10, 2025

Many Children Left Behind: The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress Results Indicate a Five-Alarm Fire

Key Points  Introduction By now, the awful results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)1 have been publicized, chewed over, and digested—and they are already moving into the rearview mirror as states, school districts, and teachers fall back into the comfortable routine of doing the same thing over and over again.  But continuing that…

March 4, 2025

A Model for Effective and Reasonable Work Requirements

As Congress considers instituting work requirements to maintain eligibility for Medicaid, it is illustrative to examine an effective model for how such requirements have been implemented in New York City to maintain eligibility for the federal cash welfare program Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).  Proposals to mandate work requirements as a condition of receiving…

March 3, 2025

It’s Time for Time Limits on Public Housing

Like other Cabinet agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving quickly to undo long-standing progressive policies. New HUD Secretary Scott Turner has asserted that the agency is now “DEI-free.” Perhaps even more significantly, the agency is considering implementing time limits and work requirements for tenants of public and subsidized housing.  Although we should expect howls of protest from tenant…