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
Protectionism is Failing and Wrongheaded: An Evaluation of the Post-2017 Shift toward Trade Wars and Industrial Policy
Abstract The Trump–Pence and Biden–Harris administrations enthusiastically embraced protectionism. Each administration explicitly argued for a break from the bipartisan consensus of recent decades that has been generally supportive of free trade and of allowing markets to shape US industrial and employment composition. But the protectionism of the Trump and Biden administrations has not succeeded and…
October 2, 2024
The effect of taxes and transfers on low-earning workers’ income.
Despite misperceptions that the United States is limping through late-stage capitalism, American workers are more highly compensated than ever before—even the lowest earners. The 20th percentile earner—worse-off than 80 percent of workers—had annual earnings 19 percent higher in 2022 than in 1979, after accounting for inflation and a decline in women choosing to work only…
September 25, 2024
The Costs of Inaction: Economic Risks from Housing Unaffordability
Chairman Whitehouse, Ranking Member Grassley, and committee members, thank you for the opportunity to testify on this most important topic. History offers a cautionary tale against inappropriate federal action in the housing market: From the 1930s to 2008, Congress passed and presidents signed into law at least 43 housing, urban renewal, and community development programs. Despite their lofty…
September 25, 2024
The Promise — and Danger — of Kamala Harris’s YIMBYism
Vice President Kamala Harris is not wrong to emphasize that the best solution to our housing shortage is the construction of new homes. She’s actually enunciated something close to a program to do so: tax credits for small “starter” homes, as part of a push for 3 million new houses. It’s encouraging that the Democratic presidential candidate shows a basic knowledge…
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…
September 23, 2024
Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation
The views expressed in this report are those of the individual authors who collectively constitute the Grand Bargain Committee, co-chaired by Michael R. Strain and Isabel V. Sawhill. This report was sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Democracy and was prepared independent of influence from the center and from any other outside party or institution. It…
September 23, 2024
The Kamala Harris Plan for More Housing Shortages
A signature feature of Kamala Harris’s housing plan is providing first-time home buyers with $25,000 in down-payment support, at a total cost of $100 billion over four years. Absent a severe recession, this policy is all but certain to lead to higher home prices. That’s because the four million program recipients would become price setters for…
September 20, 2024
Don’t Believe the Doomsayers. The American Dream Is Still In Reach for Young People
The American dream is still alive and can be achieved in just one generation, even among the most economically disadvantaged young people. That finding is among the most promising takeaways from new research produced by Harvard University’s Raj Chetty and his collaborators. These analysts studied economic outcomes for 57 million children born between 1978 and 1992, whose…
September 17, 2024
The Future of Work
Since Generation Z has begun entering the workforce, debates swirl around whether young Americans are working too much or not enough. Following Scott Winship’s article in Fusion, Young Voices and Fusion Magazine will host a discussion Tuesday, September 17th to tease out the nuances and future possibilities of what work could—or should—look like for young…