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March 13, 2025

Trends in Net College Tuition and Financial Aid, 1990–2020

Key Points  Introduction College costs are out of control—or so the narrative goes. In recent years, a counternarrative has emerged that argues, correctly, that the meteoric rise in the sticker price of college is misleading. Net college tuition, or tuition after financial aid is applied, has risen far less quickly than sticker price tuition and…

March 13, 2025

Housing Roadblocks: Paving a New Way to Address Affordability

Thank you, Chairman Scott and ranking member Warren. Thank you, committee members. I am gratefuland honored to have the opportunity to speak to you today. I am an economist who has spent much of the last quarter-century studying what has gone wrong withAmerica’s housing markets. Initially, I worried mainly about the high costs and limited…

March 12, 2025

Why Alabama Needs The Success Sequence

“The American Dream is beyond my reach.” This is increasingly the view that many young men and women take regarding the long-held belief that anyone can succeed in the United States. In fact, over half of young adults today believe the American Dream is no longer within their reach. What many of them do not know is that…

March 12, 2025

Stop and Go

Automated driving is picking up speed. Several years ago there was a bit of a moral panic about the prospect of automated freight transportation replacing human truck drivers. These concerns were, in part, about the prospect of automating yet another large and important industry that was dominated by noncollege, male workers. The issue faded from…

March 11, 2025

The American Dream in Ohio depends on stronger Buckeye families

The “American dream” is a “better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank,” wrote the historian James Truslow Adams over a century ago. Yet with ordinary Americans succumbing to “deaths of despair” at alarming rates, rates of happiness hitting record lows and way too many men and women stuck in poverty across generations, it’s probably no surprise…

March 11, 2025

An Evaluation of Cost Saving Reforms of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

AbstractCongress is considering ways to reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by $230 billion over ten years. Reforms are likely to include one or more of the following cost-saving elements: reducing the maximum SNAP benefit, reducing deductions, expanding work requirements, and ending broad based categorical eligibility. In this paper I analyze each…

March 11, 2025

Democrats’ DOGE Delusions

While occupied with budget bills to keep the government open and set future spending and tax levels, Congress is also cleaning up past messes. Today, the House is expected to vote on legislation to hold criminals accountable for stealing over $100 billion in pandemic-era unemployment benefits. All agree on the urgent need for action, but Democrats’…

March 10, 2025

Many Children Left Behind: The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress Results Indicate a Five-Alarm Fire

Key Points  Introduction By now, the awful results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)1 have been publicized, chewed over, and digested—and they are already moving into the rearview mirror as states, school districts, and teachers fall back into the comfortable routine of doing the same thing over and over again.  But continuing that…

March 6, 2025

America’s New Frontier of Opportunity and Inclusion

It would be a king-sized understatement to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have had better weeks, months, years, and decades than they are currently experiencing. From the Supreme Court’s ruling that banned affirmative action in admissions, to the Trump administration’s full-scale bureaucratic offensive to expunge DEI from federal policy and programs, to corporate America’s widespread retreat from years…

March 4, 2025

A Model for Effective and Reasonable Work Requirements

As Congress considers instituting work requirements to maintain eligibility for Medicaid, it is illustrative to examine an effective model for how such requirements have been implemented in New York City to maintain eligibility for the federal cash welfare program Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).  Proposals to mandate work requirements as a condition of receiving…