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October 12, 2023
Republicans looking to expand their party’s coalition have a problem. The public identifies them above all with Donald Trump, who is decidedly unpopular. Voters who can possibly stand Trump (and even some who can’t) are already Republicans. And when Republicans talk about something other than Trump, it is generally the Democrats. So swing voters know that the…
October 12, 2023
The late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan long complained — and commissioned data — about New York’s status as a “donor state,” for sending more in tax dollars to Washington than it received in return in the form of grants. This was always a misunderstanding of the virtues of the U.S. being a vast free-trade…
September 18, 2023
We’re living through one of the greatest housing crunches the U.S. has ever known. It’s resulted in record numbers of homelessness and entire generations certain they will never become homeowners, that critical milestone of the middle class. But there is a simple solution to the problem. The answer to our housing crisis is to legalize…
September 18, 2023
Late last month, President Biden and his Department of Education announced the launch of the “SAVE” Plan, a reform that expands existing income-driven repayment (IDR) programs to the tune of up to $550 billion. Now, it’s been reported that as many as 4 million borrowers have signed up for the plan, many of them enrolled automatically. Last week, Senator Bill…
September 15, 2023
With Democrats and Republicans alike supporting a shift from free markets toward government planning, the United States has clearly entered a new era of economic policymaking. Yet all the reasons why such strategies generally fail to make good on politicians’ promises are as valid as ever. WASHINGTON, DC – Industrial policy is all the rage…
September 15, 2023
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve written one column arguing that the economic situation for working class America is now better, relative to a decade ago, than some pessimistic populists make it sound, and another arguing that the eating-away at American wages because of inflation explains some important measure of President Biden’s political difficulties. I think both of…
September 14, 2023
The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, by Melissa S. Kearney (University of Chicago Press, 240 pp., $25) Imagine you are twelve years old and your public-school teacher asks you and your seventh-grade classmates to stand side by side in a line. The instructor lists a series of personal attributes and…
September 1, 2023
“Frankly, whenever elections come up politicians tend to unveil grand measures aimed at resolving the birthrate issue,” Choi Seul-ki, a demographer in South Korea, told the Wall Street Journal. “But cash is a limited incentive in changing people’s outlook on life.” Indeed, South Korea has spent more than $210 billion in the past decade in an effort to…
August 21, 2023
I recently wrote a brief essay, “Generative AI and Economic Growth,” for Exponential View, the great newsletter by Azeem Azhar. And I knew one particular passage would be sure to raise eyebrows: A lengthy and fundamentally solid expansion would allow the economic progress of the pre-pandemic period — falling inequality, rising real wages across the income…
August 10, 2023
More than a decade ago, the Pew Research Center released a path-breaking study on people without religion: “Nones” on the Rise. At the time, I was in graduate school studying political science and working full-time as a pollster. Partly inspired by this work, I wrote my dissertation exploring why people leave religion: “And Then There Were Nones:…