April 10, 2024
Biden Irresponsibly Encourages Borrowers to Enroll in SAVE Plan
President Biden is hard at work encouraging student borrowers to enroll in his new SAVE Plan, a de facto loan forgiveness program that faces increasing legal scrutiny. 11 states, led by Kansas, filed a lawsuit. Just recently, Missouri and six other states announced that they would also sue the Biden Administration, bringing the total to 18 states. He…
April 9, 2024
Maddow Spreads Misinformation on Student Loan Cancellation
Last night, progressive television pundit Rachel Maddow took jabs at Republicans concerned with President Biden’s latest effort to cancel student debt. But her jabs were actually sucker punches. She took advantage of the public’s being uninformed on the issue of student debt to spread misinformation, aimed at scoring partisan points and defending Biden’s indefensible vote-buying…
April 9, 2024
The Child Tax Credit: My Long-Read Q&A with Kevin Corinth
The Child Tax Credit is a tax benefit available to many American families for the purpose of reducing their federal income tax liability. It’s specifically designed to help offset the cost of raising children. The CTC of today, however, differs starkly from its pre-pandemic structure. Many economists, including Kevin Corinth, think that the post-pandemic changes were a step…
April 9, 2024
Biden Knows Student Loan Cancellation Is a Bad Idea
This morning, President Biden announced new details about the latest effort to cancel student debt that he says will reduce balances or completely cancel student debt for over 30 million Americans. First, he plans to cancel up to $20,000 of accumulated unpaid interest, regardless of the borrowers’ income. Second, the administration plans to automatically cancel debt for…
April 5, 2024
What’s Wrong with the US Economy? Anything?
Economists were expecting 200,000 net new jobs added in March. Instead it was 50 percent more. Unexpected strength, but maybe not so unexpected, really, for an economy that continues to deliver surprise after surprise. It’s been a great run lately for economic optimists: real wage gains, faster labor productivity, and gobs of jobs. A tight summary…
April 3, 2024
Feds Should Take a Big Step Back on Student Loans
The federal student loan program has gone off the rails. What was first designed as a program to alleviate the liquidity problem students face when paying for college is now an out-of-control entitlement program that rewards students for spending as much as possible on higher education, causing tuition costs to skyrocket in turn. Biden’s reforms…
March 28, 2024
Federal Student Lending is Beyond Repair
The integrity of the federal student loan program has been in precipitous decline since early 2020, when then-President Trump responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by putting a pause on student loan repayment. In retrospect, that move was the first domino to fall in a string of policy changes, culminating in the implementation of President Biden’s…
March 20, 2024
When Workers Say They Value Flexibility, They Mean It
FlexJobs, a career services firm specializing in remote and hybrid jobs, is out with another of its regular surveys on American attitudes towards job flexibility. Consistent with our own surveys, which found Americans valued flexibility on the job above all other factors, including pay, the new FlexJobs data takes the analysis a step or two further. It appears that…
March 11, 2024
Louisiana’s FAFSA U-Turn Signals That “College-for-All” Has Peaked
Fifteen years ago, AEI’s ever-prescient Charles Murray argued in Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality that too many students were going to college—that “college-for-all” loomed too large in K-12 schooling, distorted our priorities, and had fueled the neglect of career and technical education. That take was noxious to education advocates, philanthropists,…
March 6, 2024
Caitlin Clark and Civil Society
When Larry Bird won his first National Basketball Association championship with the Boston Celtics in 1982, he made one of the best locker room interview comments ever. Between puffs of a victory cigar, he said, “This one’s for Terre Haute.” He was literally referring to the Indiana city which had supported his Indiana State college team—but…