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January 14, 2025

The Pornography Industry Should Not Be Allowed This Much Access to Our Children

Imagine someone drove a white van into your neighborhood, opened up the panel door, and invited children and teens from the neighborhood, including yours, to watch sexually explicit videos of men and women doing the most degrading things possible. In most of our neighborhoods, such a man would be arrested in minutes, and we would…

January 10, 2025

Marriage: America’s Keystone Institution

Marriage is linked to better financial, social, and emotional outcomes for children, men, and women—and many of these effects appear to have a causal dimension. Many social scientists have discovered these basic patterns of findings in their work over the years. But one new development in this research is that we are seeing more evidence…

January 8, 2025

Menu Adjustment in Response to the Minimum Wage: A Return to the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Border

Abstract This paper studies how output prices are affected by increases in the minimum wage. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first examination of how the prices of an entire menu of items at a single business adjust in response to a minimum wage increase. Using data we gather from a fast-food…

January 7, 2025

Tax Policy Should Prioritize Shoring Up the Family

During the Biden years, tax policy related to the family revolved around the child tax credit (CTC). Attempts to expand the credit to make it easier for two-parent families to have kids and rely on a sole breadwinner were thwarted by objections that a child allowance would also promote single-parent families in which no one…

January 7, 2025

Ozempic and Your Community

As holiday treats give way to New Year’s Resolutions, the names of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy will be on millions of lips this January—in addition to any leftover fruitcake, eggnog, cookies, and latkes. But the benefits of these drugs aren’t limited to what they can do for an individual’s health. Recent analysis…

January 7, 2025

More Skilled Immigrants for More Economic Growth

The recent appointment of venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan, an Elon Musk ally, to the incoming Trump administration sparked controversy on X (formerly Twitter) among MAGA supporters. The conflict arose from Krishnan’s past support for removing green card country caps for skilled immigrants, a position aligned with Silicon Valley but controversial among some Trump supporters. Amid this debate,…

January 6, 2025

Congress Can Block Student Loan Cancellation—Forever

Over the holiday season, the Biden administration withdrew two pending regulations to unilaterally cancel hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of student loans. Officials evidently judged that the administration would not have time to finalize and implement the new regulations before the Trump administration takes over. For the time being, loan cancellation by executive action is dead. But a…

January 3, 2025

AI and People: Better Together

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked widespread debate about its potential to displace highly-skilled workers. Recent research by Emilio Colombo and his colleagues, Towards the Terminator Economy, offers a more encouraging view. The authors’ findings suggest that among more highly skilled workers, generative AI may actually enhance productivity, increase wages, and boost employment….

January 3, 2025

Thanks, Joe Manchin

During transitions of power, it’s easy to fixate on a new administration’s nominees and legislative agenda while losing sight of those exiting the political stage. But as the new Congress begins today, we shouldn’t ignore the significant contributions of outgoing Senator Joe Manchin (I., W.Va.), a stalwart advocate of work over welfare dependency — even when…

January 2, 2025

AI Will Have a Major Impact on Labor Markets. Here’s How the US Can Prepare

The nation can do better at forecasting AI-driven job and skill changes, including with a data-focused nonprofit that examines the technology’s impact. Markets are the killer app for efficiently organizing unfathomably complex human activities to deliver innovation and prosperity. They can also shift suddenly, creating winners and losers, even as broad measures of economic health…