November 7, 2024
Key Data on Federal Benefits Paid to Illegal Immigrant Households
Soaring illegal immigration during the Biden-Harris administration was a major campaign theme, with a pre-election Harvard poll finding Americans considered immigration the second-most important issue—right behind inflation and ahead of the economy. An AP exit poll seconded that ranking, with 39 percent of voters citing the economy as their top issue, followed by immigration at 20 percent—up from three…
November 4, 2024
Again, Tariffs Didn’t Make American Manufacturing Great
Nationalist/populist conservatives, including the Republican nominee, claim that US economic history supports their views of trade protectionism. Donald Trump says “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and that America “in the 1890s was probably the wealthiest it ever was” because of its tariff system. First, per capita GDP is, conservatively, seven times higher…
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 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 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
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 8, 2024
Unplanned Obsolescence
Tech sector layoffs have grabbed a lot of headlines over the past two years since the Federal Reserve ended its zero interest rate policy that enabled vast investment in research, development, and high-tech start-ups and as artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to reshape a growing number of sectors. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal highlights a harsh…
October 3, 2024
Six Ideas to Fix Higher Education in 2025
America will have a new president and a new Congress in 2025, and with that change comes the opportunity to rethink federal policy towards higher education. The federal approach suffers from many problems, but the core one is that federal subsidies indiscriminately fund traditional colleges, regardless of their financial value, and shortchange promising alternatives, such…
October 3, 2024
The New “Old Girls Network” in the American Workplace
One of America’s great success stories has been the gradual opening of opportunities for women in nearly every field, from athletics to higher education. Nowhere has the change been more profound than in the workplace. In 1970, just over 15 percent of all management jobs were held by women. According to McKinsey, that figure has now risen…
September 23, 2024
The Last Bipartisan Policy
Name a policy that Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Ron DeSantis, and Gavin Newsome all support. And I don’t mean something they are passively allowing or a shallow endorsement of motherhood and apple pie, but real, meaningful policy they are running on in campaigns and enacting while in office. The list of such policies is not…