August 16, 2024
The Harris Campaign’s Foolish Down-Payment-Assistance Scheme
On the surface, Kamala Harris’s proposal to provide $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers looks to be an incentive for upward mobility. Historically, homeownership has been the foundation for wealth creation for those of modest means. On closer inspection, however, down-payment assistance sends the wrong message — not only because already high home prices are likely to…
August 6, 2024
Trump’s Tax Law Diminished Incentives for Charitable Giving, But We Can Fix It
Debate over the potential renewal of the so-called Trump tax cuts of 2017 will be building as their expiration approaches next year. The focus will likely be on corporate and personal tax rates. But there’s a less-appreciated but consequential side effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: its impact on charitable giving. Simply put,…
May 14, 2024
Biden Can Follow FDR and Dump His VP
Almost exactly 80 years ago, a Democratic leader from the Bronx huddled privately with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As told in the powerful new book by historian David Roll, “Ascent to Power, How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World,” Ed Flynn and other leading Democrats were concerned that his vice president, the far Left…
May 8, 2024
Correcting for Bias; How Public Radio Can Better Serve All Americans
Good morning. Thank you Chair Griffith and Ranking Member Cator. I’m Howard Husock, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I also have a background in public broadcasting. I was honored to serve as member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and as a documentary film producer at Boston public…
May 4, 2024
Make Parents Pay for Kids Who Miss School To Curb Chronic School Absenteeism
The COVID pandemic has ebbed, but one of its most damaging long-term effects has not. Chronic school absenteeism — collateral damage from students accustomed to staying home for alleged online learning — persists across the country. In New York City, a stunning four in 10 students — some 353,000 — were chronically absent, for the last full school year…
April 30, 2024
I’m a Conservative But Defunding NPR Is a Mistake. What Should Happen Instead Might Be Surprising
The liberal political and cultural bias of National Public Radio has moved center-stage, thanks to the Free Press essay by Uri Berliner, the former NPR editor who resigned earlier this month. In his essay he correctly observed that NPR news both caters to and reflect “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US…
April 22, 2024
John Silber, the Campuses Have Need of You
The anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia University, among other colleges and universities, may be, for many involved, simply about venting anger or rage. But at Columbia, they do make a specific demand: that the university divest its endowment from firms involved in the Israeli economy. A December 1 document signed by 89 student groups—ranging from the Young…
April 21, 2024
The Real Bias at NPR: Story Selection
Concern about media bias — specifically politically liberal bias — has moved center stage thanks to the cri de coeur by National Public Radio’s Uri Berliner in the Free Press. The network’s business editor, who resigned in the aftermath of his speaking truth to power, wrote that “politics intruded” on a wide variety of coverage, from Covid to “Russiagate,”…
April 19, 2024
The New Deal’s Failed Kibbutz in the Desert
At the height of the New Deal, with the Social Security Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Civilian Conservation Corps already enacted, the Roosevelt Administration’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), veered from reform to the outright radical: the establishment of an American version of a Soviet collective farm. The largest of nine such projects…
April 8, 2024
Accountability Comes to Public Housing
With little fanfare, the impossible just happened at the Hope Gardens public housing project in Bushwick: the management got fired. Repairs to the project’s high rises and townhouses had been delayed, and, per an official notice, “cost-saving measures to curb ballooning controllable operating expenses” hadn’t been adopted. Such lack of foresight constitutes a typical day…