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March 28, 2025

Unfreezing New York’s Projects

The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea…

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,…

February 25, 2025

We Replaced Families with Uncle Sam. DOGE Must Make the Right Choices When Cutting

If we want a smaller government, we need stronger families.  President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size and scope of government through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has the potential to change the trajectory of the nation. But Trump can’t deliver this promise only by cutting wasteful spending. American taxpayers have been forced to fund…

February 24, 2025

What Do You Call an Automatic Stabilizer that Doesn’t Shrink When Conditions Improve? The Biden Food Stamps Blowout

Last month the Wall Street Journal editorial board (“The Great Biden Welfare Blowout”) reviewed the staggering number of welfare recipients in key programs at the close of the Biden administration:  Some 84.6 million individuals are enrolled in Medicaid—about a quarter of the population—roughly the same as when Mr. Biden entered office. About 42.6 million Americans…

September 10, 2024

Event: New Census Data on American Families’ Economic Well-Being

Event Summary On September 10, AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility gathered leading experts to analyze the new poverty and economic numbers from the US Census Bureau for 2023. AEI’s Kevin Corinth began by summarizing the data’s main findings. Median household income rose, and the official poverty measure (OPM) showed that poverty declined while…

August 30, 2024

Harris’s Child Tax Credit Plan Punishes Working Families

Vice President Kamala Harris recently announced an economic plan for her presidential campaign. A centerpiece is the transformation of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a child allowance. If it became reality, the policy would discourage parental employment and risk harming the long-run prospects of children. These unintended consequences together with the plan’s cost should…

August 26, 2024

Vouching for Self-Sufficiency

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

Harris’s Child Tax Credit Proposal Could Backfire, Perpetuating Poverty

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 23, 2024

Can Kamala Harris Learn the Housing Lessons from Her Own History?

In a biographical aside in her Thursday night nomination-acceptance speech, Kamala Harris spoke eloquently, and perhaps inadvertently, about “affordable housing” policy. She recalled the neighborhood in the East Bay where her mother rented an apartment: In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats — A beautiful, working-class neighborhood…