April 11, 2025
How The Trump Administration Can Address The Student Loan Nonpayment Crisis
After the federal government suspended student loan repayment for four and a half years, payments are finally due again—yet less than half of borrowers are repaying their debts on time. These high rates of student loan nonpayment threaten to ruin many borrowers’ credit records and send millions into default. Low student loan receipts could also cost taxpayers…
April 9, 2025
Measuring and Building Human Leadership in an AI World
A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Measuring Human Leadership Skills With AI Agents, presents evidence that artificial intelligence may soon play a central role in evaluating human soft skills—long considered too complex and subjective to measure objectively. Conducted by Ben Weidmann and David Deming et al. at the Harvard Kennedy School,…
April 9, 2025
Trump’s Tariff Formula Is Still Wrong. Maybe That’s Why No One Will Admit They Created It.
Last Friday, we showed that the Trump Administration’s tariff formula contained an error that made its calculated tariffs up to four times too large. The entire premise of the administration’s approach—that a country’s tariff and non-tariff trade barriers can be derived solely from the bilateral trade balance with that country, and that the goal of…
April 8, 2025
Public Support of Health Insurance Enrollment
Health insurance subsidies, especially as provided by Medicaid, are under scrutiny as Republicans scout for savings to make way for their tax agenda. However, instead of selective cuts, Congress should simplify the enrollment rules, treat individuals with similar incomes more equally regardless of where they get their coverage, and implement reforms which will lower costs…
April 8, 2025
Could A Higher Endowment Tax Pressure Elite Schools To Expand?
Congressional Republicans are considering a significant hike in the excise tax on the endowments of rich universities as part of a broader tax reform effort. Most private universities with more than $500,000 in endowment assets per student are subject to a 1.4 percent excise tax on their net investment income. Some Republicans have proposed raising that tax rate to…
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…
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 25, 2025
AI Talent: It’s Not Just for High Tech Anymore
We appear to be approaching the break-out phase of artificial intelligence’s diffusion across the American economy. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, recent data from the University of Maryland’s AI job tracker finds that nearly 25 percent of tech job postings earlier this year mentioned AI skills. And it isn’t just the tech sector that’s hiring—finance, professional…
March 25, 2025
Less Than Half of Student Borrowers Are Paying Their Loans
Student loan payments have been due for six months now—yet no one seems to have told the students. The federal government effectively suspended payments on student loans for four and a half years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading many borrowers to lose touch with their loan servicers and disengage from the repayment system. False promises of loan cancellation…
March 25, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: IES, Workforce Skills, and State Leadership
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has taken a hit from DOGE, losing about 90 percent of its workforce. Regardless of the future of the Education Department, we need to continue to improve education R&D and identify what in IES should be preserved, or indeed expanded, to meet the nation’s needs today and in the…