April 7, 2025
Discussing President Trump’s tariff formula: Corinth on ‘Bloomberg Insight’
Kevin Corinth, Deputy Director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, discusses how President Trump’s formula to calculate tariffs was incorrect on Bloomberg TV’s ‘Bloomberg Insight.’
April 4, 2025
President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error.
President Trump on Wednesday announced tariffs on practically every foreign country (and some non-countries), ranging from a 10 percent minimum all the way up to 50 percent. The economic fallout has been dramatic, with the stock market losing nine percent of its value (based on the S&P 500 index at the time of writing) and…
April 4, 2025
How One State Improved Its NAEP Scores
The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress results had a lot of bad news, but there were some scattered bright spots. Louisiana was one of them. In fact, the Pelican State was the only state in the nation that outperformed its pre-pandemic 4th grade reading scores on the 2024 NAEP. Over the past two…
April 3, 2025
The dangerous myth that poverty is the cause of child abuse
Why does child abuse happen? A new public service announcement says most people think it’s a “bad parent problem,” but the ad suggests “the root causes may be different than you think.” This message from Prevent Child Abuse America goes on to explain that child abuse is the result of families’ lack of financial resources — a…
April 3, 2025
Trump’s Tariffs Are a Historic Tax Hike
If implemented, the tariffs announced yesterday by President Trump would constitute the largest tax increase since the 1968 levies to fund the Vietnam War. The details will matter, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the tariffs — which are taxes on imported goods — could be as large as 2 percent of annual GDP. This tax increase…
April 1, 2025
Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Dangerous Radicalism on Child Welfare
Socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has made a splash in the race for New York City mayor. A relentless social media campaign has helped him raise big dollars, despite his long-shot odds against incumbent mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani has also adopted a platform of terrible ideas. His campaign materials portray him as a Robin…
April 1, 2025
Did Maltreatment Fatalities in Texas Really Decline?
A drop in the number of children entering foster care and fatalities due to abuse in Texas is, on its face, welcome news, and some stakeholders in the well-being of children are heartened. “There have been more net positives than any negatives that show up,” Brandon Logan, executive director of the Texas nonprofit One Accord…
March 31, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: DARPA for Education
Earlier in my professional life, I was the head of the political science department at Stony Brook University. When the chairs of the arts and science met, someone from the physical or life sciences would inevitably argue that the “hard” natural sciences deserved more support than the “soft” social sciences. My rejoinder was one of…
March 31, 2025
Putting Children First: Child Welfare Priorities for the New Administration
Event Summary On March 31, AEI hosted a discussion on child welfare priorities, moderated by AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley. Experts Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, Rachel N. Morrison of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Darcy Olsen of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, and Tom Rawlings of Child Welfare…
March 31, 2025
Tom Cotton Should Go Further: An Endowment Tax Should Not Exclude Big Foundations
Pressure in Congress is rapidly growing to respond to the Left-leaning tilt of universities by increasing the excise tax on their endowments. There’s no doubt that for legislators concerned about both the quality of education and looking for a way to raise revenue without increasing tax rates, endowments such as Harvard’s $50 billion or Yale’s $40 billion…