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February 6, 2024

NYCHA Corruption Means It’s Time To Privatize

We already knew the New York City Housing Authority is the city’s biggest slumlord. Now we’re reminded it’s a corrupt slumlord. Just five years after a federal court found its employees had lied about a vital public-health matter — conducting lead-paint inspections of apartments — we learn NYCHA supervisors solicited bribes in exchange for no-bid repair contracts. US Attorney…

February 6, 2024

Research by a Top Biden Administration Economist Reinforces the Importance of Work Incentives in the Child Tax Credit and the Safety Net

For the past two years, economist Jacob Bastian has been the main researcher dedicated to trumpeting the virtues of a child tax credit (CTC) expansion. Writing first as an economist from academic perches at Rutgers and Princeton, later as an affiliate of moderate think tanks like the Niskanen Center and the R Street Institute, and…

February 5, 2024

Why We All Rely On the Organized Kindness of Strangers

Our church caught fire [i] a few weeks ago. The pastor and a few other leaders had just gotten out of a Monday night meeting when they found the sanctuary was filled with smoke and the entrance to the church was covered in flames. Fortunately, firefighters[ii] responded to the immediate 911 calls and saved the…

February 5, 2024

The Biden Administration’s War on Flexibility at Work

One of the signal errors of Biden administration policy has been its tendency to take regulatory actions that reduce the flexibility of the economy generally and the labor market in particular. The latest example of this problem is a new US Department of Labor rule aimed at reclassifying millions of “gig” workers—people who work in contract roles—as employees. The…

February 2, 2024

Has Intergenerational Progress Stalled? Income Growth over Five Generations of Americans

Abstract We find that each of the past four generations of Americans was better off than the previous one, using a post-tax, post-transfer income measure constructed annually from 1963-2022 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. At age 36–40, Millennials had a real median household income that was 18 percent higher…

January 31, 2024

How Should State and Local Governments Respond to Illegal Retail Cannabis?

Introduction Legal cannabis has become a fact of life in much of the United States. The District of Columbia and 24 states now permit the sale of recreational marijuana; they, and 14 additional states, also permit marijuana sale for supposedly medical purposes. Of course, the Food and Drug Administration has not actually approved marijuana for…

January 31, 2024

The Wyden-Smith Child Tax Credit and Work: Responding to Critics

The Wyden-Smith tax bill under consideration in the House has rekindled a debate about the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and work incentives. We, along with our colleagues, Angela Rachidi and Matt Weidinger, recently released an analysis of the incentives built into one overlooked feature of the CTC reforms proposed in the bill—the so-called “look-back” provision….

January 31, 2024

Perspective: The ‘social workplace’ and why it matters to Zoomers

Social connections are increasingly as important as pay to younger workers. A mission-led workplace can help In his 1759 book “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Adam Smith observed that human sociality is the taproot of economics. The instinct to “truck, barter and exchange,” Smith argued, arises out of our need for others and is the…

January 30, 2024

Democrats in the House Have a New (Old) Plan for Higher Education

Lately, it’s been Republican lawmakers who have been at the table and offering up comprehensive reform for higher education policy, but this week House Democrats got back in the game. Today, they released new legislation outlining their vision for higher education reform beyond the administration-led student loan cancellation agenda. In some sense, this marks a welcome return to normalcy,…