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September 10, 2024
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…
September 9, 2024
The chaos of summer is over. Kids have gone back to school. But fall brings a whole new set of challenges. We parents have spent the past few weeks creating complex matrices — schedules for child care, after-school activities, and car pools. But by next week, someone will get sick, or a babysitter will quit, and…
September 6, 2024
A new school year is beginning, and students are returning to school, but the question this year is how many will return to attending consistently. Chronic absenteeism, the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year, nearly doubled during the pandemic, surging from 15 percent of K–12 students in 2019 to…
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 30, 2024
To the Editor: New research showing a sharp decline in giving in 2018 — the year after passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — must be tempered by a consideration of the extent of nonitemized giving, which is often difficult to capture. Rasheeda Childress’s article “Donors Likely Giving $16 Billion Less Each…
August 30, 2024
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 29, 2024
Abstract There have been several attempts to measure social capital—the value inhering in relationships—at an aggregate level, but researchers lack comprehensive individual-level social capital measures. Using a combination of direct linkage and imputation across several nationally representative datasets, we produce a comprehensive measure of social capital at the individual level. We validate our measure by…
August 29, 2024
Given her liberal record, it’s no surprise that Vice President Kamala Harris’s recently released economic agenda calls for vast increases in benefits for low-income adults. But it should be surprising for that spending to be cast as tax relief since low-income adults pay few, if any, federal income taxes in the first place. That’s the spin Harris…