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April 11, 2024

The Right Has an Opportunity to Rethink Education in America

The casual observer can be forgiven if it looks like both the left and the right are doing their best to lose the debate over the future of American education. On the left, public officials and self-righteous advocates practically fall over themselves working to subsidize and supersize bloated bureaucracies, hollowed-out urban school systems, and campus…

April 10, 2024

The Political Landmines Buried in the Latest Jobs Report

CNN on Friday dubbed the latest monthly jobs report a “blowout,” pointing to 303,000 net new jobs created in March. President Joe Biden immediately claimed credit, saying the report “marks a milestone in America’s comeback,” as it indicates a total of “15 million jobs created since I took office.” Meanwhile, the latest data confirm that most…

April 10, 2024

Biden Irresponsibly Encourages Borrowers to Enroll in SAVE Plan

President Biden is hard at work encouraging student borrowers to enroll in his new SAVE Plan, a de facto loan forgiveness program that faces increasing legal scrutiny. 11 states, led by Kansas, filed a lawsuit. Just recently, Missouri and six other states announced that they would also sue the Biden Administration, bringing the total to 18 states. He…

April 9, 2024

The Case for Curriculum Reform

The education reform movement over the past few decades has focused on standardized testing, accountability, and programs to transform the teacher workforce. During this time, there was surprisingly little conversation about the often slapdash and unchallenging curricula that define many American classrooms. Could curriculum reform be the answer to some of the longest-standing questions in…

April 9, 2024

Child Abandonment in the Name of Compassion

A self-described libertarian friend once described to me the feeling she had when it was time to leave the hospital with her newborn baby. She remembered looking at the nurse and thinking, “You’re just going to let me take this thing home? I have no idea what I’m doing.” Even those of us who are…

April 9, 2024

Maddow Spreads Misinformation on Student Loan Cancellation

Last night, progressive television pundit Rachel Maddow took jabs at Republicans concerned with President Biden’s latest effort to cancel student debt. But her jabs were actually sucker punches. She took advantage of the public’s being uninformed on the issue of student debt to spread misinformation, aimed at scoring partisan points and defending Biden’s indefensible vote-buying…

April 9, 2024

The Child Tax Credit: My Long-Read Q&A with Kevin Corinth

The Child Tax Credit is a tax benefit available to many American families for the purpose of reducing their federal income tax liability. It’s specifically designed to help offset the cost of raising children. The CTC of today, however, differs starkly from its pre-pandemic structure. Many economists, including Kevin Corinth, think that the post-pandemic changes were a step…

April 9, 2024

Biden Knows Student Loan Cancellation Is a Bad Idea

This morning, President Biden announced new details about the latest effort to cancel student debt that he says will reduce balances or completely cancel student debt for over 30 million Americans. First, he plans to cancel up to $20,000 of accumulated unpaid interest, regardless of the borrowers’ income. Second, the administration plans to automatically cancel debt for…

April 8, 2024

Accountability Comes to Public Housing

With little fanfare, the impossible just happened at the Hope Gardens public housing project in Bushwick: the management got fired. Repairs to the project’s high rises and townhouses had been delayed, and, per an official notice, “cost-saving measures to curb ballooning controllable operating expenses” hadn’t been adopted. Such lack of foresight constitutes a typical day…

April 8, 2024

The $1,000 Tax Hike on Middle-Class Families

When Americans file their taxes in the coming weeks, one group will be singled out for a tax hike: middle-class families with children. This April, a family with three children making at least $42,000 will pay about $950 more in (inflation-adjusted) federal income taxes than they paid in 2018 — when the Tax Cuts and Jobs…