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October 25, 2024

How Workforce Education Can Boost Earnings and Fill Jobs

Republicans and Democrats alike agree about the importance of workforce training. They’re right: Despite a recent labor-market cooling, there are still 7.7 million unfilled jobs in the United States. Unfortunately, America’s workforce-education system is a patchwork of dubious efficacy. Workforce programs are underfunded, tangled in red tape, and often fail to achieve their goals. Fixing this is hard: There’s…

October 23, 2024

Work Requirement Waivers Increased FoodShare Caseloads and Costs in Wisconsin

Employment plays a crucial role in helping families escape poverty and move up the income ladder. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, created through welfare reform in 1996, showed that linking government assistance to work could increase employment and decrease poverty among single-mother families. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps,…

October 23, 2024

The College Enrollment Plunge Is the Biden Administration’s Disaster

The number of first-year students on America’s college campuses dropped five percent this fall, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s new enrollment estimates. The drop—which reverses last year’s four percent increase in freshman enrollment—is directly attributable to the Education Department’s bungled launch of a new financial aid application form, which prevented hundreds of thousands of students…

October 22, 2024

Poverty, Hardship, and Government Transfers

Abstract We examine how the well-being of those with few resources changed, amidst economic disruption and large, transitory government transfers. We find that in the years leading up to the pandemic and in 2020, the patterns for income and consumption poverty were very similar. In 2021 and 2022, however, changes in income and consumption poverty…

October 21, 2024

Dueling Child Tax Credit Proposals: Harris vs. Vance

JD Vance and Kamala Harris have at least one thing in common: proposals to expand the child tax credit (CTC). Currently, the CTC offers households up to $2,000 per child under the age of 17. It phases in as wages exceed $2,500 (an incentive to work) and phases out for high-income workers (a disincentive to…

October 21, 2024

US Tariffs Will Not Bring Back Jobs from China

Although protectionism has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in America, the public debate about it gets some basic facts wrong. Yes, trade is disruptive, but the US has been unwilling to take advantage of the opportunities generated by it and is instead trying in vain to recreate the jobs of the past. Washington,…

October 18, 2024

What’s Working in America’s Workforce System

The American workforce is undergoing rapid changes driven by demographic shifts,  technological advancements, and evolving skill requirements. During this time of rapid disruption, the question arises: How can our training programs and workforce development systems do a better job of supporting workers and employers to meet their skill and employment needs? The Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI)—a collaborative research effort between…

October 18, 2024

Harris and Trump Are Equally Silent on the Expanding US Debt

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seem to agree that one of the nation’s most important challenges should remain unaddressed — a problem that has been slowly eroding the foundations of economic prosperity for decades. That problem? The national debt. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reports that federal debt held by the public averaged 48.3 per…

October 18, 2024

Pro-Marriage Conservatives Should Reject a Per-Child Phase-In of the Child Tax Credit

Earlier this week, scholars from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Niskanen Center, and other right-of-center organizations issued a memo calling for pro-family tax reforms during the upcoming debate over the future of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. While reasonable arguments can be made for most of their proposed reforms, their recommendation to phase in…

October 17, 2024

Harris’ Tax Plans Would Reduce Long-Term Prosperity. Trump’s Proposals Might Be Even Worse.

AEI Scholar and Director of Economic Policy Studies Michael R. Strain contributed to the Dispatch’s Symposium titled Economic Policy Experts: Doom, Thy Name Is Populism, as a group of experts outlined the many ways in which either potential administration’s populism could lead to poor policy and worse economic outcomes. Below is a section from Michael R. Strain contribution….