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October 12, 2023
Blue States Are Getting More Federal Money Than They Should
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 29, 2023
Up To $135 Billion In Pandemic Unemployment Fraud – And Still Counting
Last week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) added a startling new figure to the ever-growing estimates of abuse inflicted on unemployment benefits during the pandemic, finding that “between $100 billion and $135 billion” was lost to fraud. As a dismal Washington Post headline summarized, “Fraudsters may have stolen $1 of every $7 in covid jobless aid.” Unfortunately, this disastrous episode…
August 31, 2023
Where Are The Energy Stamps, Joe?
As summer temperatures rise , the Biden administration has pushed its green energy agenda hard — all the while ignoring the financial pain those policies disproportionately cause lower-income Americans. Last month, the Department of Transportation released fuel economy standards constituting a de facto mandate to purchase new electric vehicles. With the average EV price exceeding $60,000 , government subsidies may help the well-off…
August 3, 2023
Fight Crime, and Poverty, with Civil Society
Maryland’s new Democratic governor, Wes Moore, has to play to his party’s increasingly left-wing base, but he also knows that problem No. 1 in much of the state is rising crime. Prince George’s County, in particular, has a much higher crime rate than the national average, and crime has been rising since the COVID lockdowns, which were extraordinarily…
July 26, 2023
How Worker Benefits Turn into Welfare
The disparity between what the federal government collects in taxes and what it spends was never greater than during the pandemic, when annual deficits peaked at $3.1 trillion in 2020. Even today, when the president swears Bidenomics is “working everywhere,” annual deficits exceed $1.5 trillion, and are expected to only grow. One little-noticed driver of record deficits was…
July 25, 2023
Not Just Tulsa
Earlier this month, an Oklahoma judge ruled that the City of Tulsa cannot be held legally or financially responsible for the actions of the violent mob that burned down the city’s Greenwood section, known as the Black Wall Street, in 1921. Three survivors of that murderous riot will not, it appears, receive compensation. Despite their disappointment, the…
July 10, 2023
Reforming the EITC to Reduce Single Parenthood and Ease Work-Family Balance
Sixty years ago, in 1963, 94% of American children were born to married mothers. Today, the figure is only 60 percent. This decline signals a fundamental disruption in the long-standing stability of the traditional family, the foremost institution shaping each generation of children. Using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, I find that in 2021, 40% of…
July 7, 2023
With Affirmative Action Gone, We Should Focus Admissions Policies on Poverty
If history is any guide, Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t mark the end of the struggle over the constitutionality of race-conscious policies. It won’t even mark the beginning of the end. Most likely, it will just be another in a long series of inflection points. To borrow from one of the…
June 30, 2023
Democrats Call Biden’s Economy “Savage” in Attempt to Revive Child Tax Credit
With unemployment near record lows and President Joe Biden running for reelection, some Democrats recently offered an unexpected take on the U.S. economy: It stinks, especially for low-income families. During a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) thundered that parents are currently “scraping by … in this savage economy,” burdened with “some of the lowest…
June 27, 2023
House Republican Plan Penalizes Marriage
If there was something liberals used to hate most about welfare reform, it was policies that promoted more work and smaller welfare caseloads. For example, during debate about 1996 reforms, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) asked what would happen to families if they didn’t meet proposed work requirements: “Do we put them on trains and send them out West?” Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said those reforms “can only encourage a…