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’…
February 27, 2025
The GOP Is Still the Pro-Marriage Party
While Elon Musk was chainsawing at CPAC, his ex-girlfriend, the singer Grimes, pleaded with him to attend to their child’s medical crisis. This dustup followed a claim by the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair that she had given birth to Musk’s 13th child. Musk’s complicated family life, combined with the admiration for Musk among many conservative writers,…
February 27, 2025
How Progressive Policy Distorted the Housing Market
For more than a century, American progressives have argued that the costs and conditions of American housing prove that the private market has failed. In the early twentieth century, the often-rough tenements of New York’s Lower East Side were deemed the work of rapacious “slumlords,” while small single-family or duplex homes that sprouted in cities…
February 25, 2025
We Replaced Families with Uncle Sam. DOGE Must Make the Right Choices When Cutting
If we want a smaller government, we need stronger families. President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size and scope of government through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has the potential to change the trajectory of the nation. But Trump can’t deliver this promise only by cutting wasteful spending. American taxpayers have been forced to fund…
February 25, 2025
Ohio Ranks Only 29th In The Family Structure Index
Ohio ranks 29th in family strength, according to a new report from the Institute for Family Studies and the Center for Christian Virtue. The Hope and a Future report spotlights the state of Ohio families, details the consequences of family breakdown in the Buckeye state, and charts a policy course to turn things round. A Dream Deferred in Ohio…
February 25, 2025
Go Fast, Break HR
How the AI talent race is reshaping recruitment. A new survey of 250 technical leaders reveals a striking paradox: Companies are dramatically increasing AI investments—some by up to 75 percent in 2025—while simultaneously finding a talent well that is running dry. Ninety-four percent of tech leaders identify talent shortages as their primary barrier to AI innovation, and…
February 24, 2025
A Glut of MBAs?
It’s all about the skills, not the credentials. You know the labor market times are changing when Harvard MBAs start showing up in the unemployment stories. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, 23 percent of recent Harvard Business School grads were still looking for work three months after graduation. In 2022, that figure was only 10 percent….
February 20, 2025
The American Dream Is Not a Coin Flip, and Wages Have Not Stagnated
In my last column, I showed that Americans’ assessments of the economy have tracked the official unemployment rate well over the long run. That is important because it suggests that both public opinion and objective measures indicate that the labor market is historically strong (though accelerating inflation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has caused these…
February 18, 2025
Why So Blue: Liberal Women Are Less Happy, More Lonely. But Why?
Young liberal women are especially prone nowadays to reporting poor mental health. This was the discovery that Zach Goldberg made almost five years ago pouring over Pew data in the spring of 2020. Further research in 2022 found that depression had surged among liberal high school girls in the last decade-and-a-half, and much more so for them than other high schoolers,…
February 14, 2025
Poverty During the Pandemic and the Role of Government Transfers
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted unprecedented policy interventions in the US that provided nearly $3 trillion to support struggling families. This column examines the short-term effects of these interventions on child poverty and finds quite different trends for income poverty and consumption poverty. While disposable income poverty declined dramatically in 2021, consumption poverty fell more gradually,…