March 28, 2025
Unfreezing New York’s Projects
The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea…
March 27, 2025
The Looming Debt Crisis, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Medicaid
Let’s start with a chart to understand the dire fiscal situation we are in as a nation. Figure 1. Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Share of Gross Domestic Product, 1940-2054 You’re looking at how sizeable federal debt has been and will be relative to gross domestic product (GDP). From 1960 to 2008, the federal debt held by…
March 24, 2025
The Student Loan Payment Pause Was a Catastrophic Mistake
In March 2020, as America shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed a law suspending federal student loan payments for six months. The payment pause ended up lasting, in effect, for four and a half years. Though well-intentioned, the pause and its repeated extensions may go down as one of the worst mistakes in…
March 21, 2025
Increasing Financial Aid Isn’t the Solution to High College Costs
Harvard University recently announced it would make tuition free for students from families earning below $200,000—but for middle-class students not lucky enough to receive a Harvard acceptance letter, college tuition is still far too expensive. As a solution, many have proposed significant increases in taxpayer-funded financial aid to reduce or even eliminate tuition for many students. This…
March 20, 2025
To Transform K-12 Education, the Trump Administration Should Measure What Matters
When the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) was first administered in 1969, nearly nine out of 10 American children were born into married, two-parent homes. By 2023, this number had decreased to six out of 10 children on average, with wide variations across racial groups. Stunning disparities in married, two-parent households by race tightly correlate with disparities in child poverty, domestic violence, and father absence—all…
March 17, 2025
Trump Should Put an End to Rent Control
We are in a time when what would have seemed to be unimaginable domestic policy changes — from the abolition of the Department of Education to cutoffs of federal support for universities — are on the table. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is involved in this creative destruction — having pulled back a Biden-era program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which tied federal assistance for…
March 14, 2025
A Historic Opportunity for Higher Education Reform
Once a sleepy policy area on the national scale, higher education is now a central issue making headlines in the overall political discourse. Believe it or not, the education policy divides between mainstream Democrats and Republicans used to be trivial. For example, 10 years ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) proposal to lower student loan interest rates to 3.9…
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 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 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,…