September 11, 2024
Doing Right by Kids: A Book Event
Event Summary On September 11, AEI’s Scott Winship gathered distinguished experts to launch the new edited volume Doing Right by Kids: Leveraging Social Capital and Innovation to Increase Opportunity, a call to increase opportunity and upward mobility for children from poor families. The first panel focused on the importance of place. Panelists discussed how to contextualize…
September 11, 2024
After Decades of Competitive Admissions, Getting into College Has Finally Become Easier
High school seniors fretting over whether they’ll receive a college acceptance letter can sleep a little easier. College admissions rates, which had been declining for decades, are now on the upswing. Indeed, most colleges now accept a greater share of their applicants today than they did twenty years ago. Until recently, rising admissions rates were far…
September 11, 2024
As America’s housing crisis intensifies, the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act of 2024 has emerged as a high-profile yet expensive solution.
The bill comes with a $500 billion price tag and endorsements from leading Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Moody’s, a major financial services company, has also blessed the act, predicting it will lower rents and significantly boost the supply of affordable housing. But before the country embraces this rosy outlook, it must confront a stark reality: Government interventions in housing…
September 10, 2024
America is Still Working
Sometimes it seems like Americans can’t decide whether we work too much or too little. We hear that because of rising inequality and a lack of good jobs, workers must toil too many hours at wages too low to support a family. By other accounts, the machines— if not robot overlords, then at least their…
September 10, 2024
Event: New Census Data on American Families’ Economic Well-Being
Event Summary On September 10, AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility gathered leading experts to analyze the new poverty and economic numbers from the US Census Bureau for 2023. AEI’s Kevin Corinth began by summarizing the data’s main findings. Median household income rose, and the official poverty measure (OPM) showed that poverty declined while…
September 6, 2024
The Latest Chronic Absenteeism Numbers
A new school year is beginning, and students are returning to school, but the question this year is how many will return to attending consistently. Chronic absenteeism, the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year, nearly doubled during the pandemic, surging from 15 percent of K–12 students in 2019 to…
September 5, 2024
Hurt Pennsylvania’s Workers to Win Pennsylvania’s Votes?
Have populist politics gotten so out of control that politicians believe they need to hurt Pennsylvania’s workers in order to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes? Yesterday, the Washington Post reported: President Joe Biden is preparing to announce that he will formally block Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel, according to three people with knowledge of the…
September 4, 2024
Kamala Harris’s Housing Plan Would Be Worse Than Doing Nothing
Originally appeared in Newsweek On August 16, presidential candidate Kamala Harris unveiled a series of housing proposals that recycle the same failed strategies that have plagued federal housing policy for decades. Among the key components are subsidies for the construction of 3 million new housing units over four years, as well as a total of $100 billion…
September 2, 2024
This Is How to Fix the Housing Crisis
Vice President Kamala Harris correctly identified one of America’s biggest problems when she said that “there’s a serious housing shortage.” America’s affordable-housing crisis exacerbates wealth inequities, leads low-income parents to live in neighborhoods with less upward mobility and reduces our country’s capacity for economic growth, innovation and adaptation to regional shocks. Unfortunately, her proposed solutions…
August 30, 2024
Harris’s Child Tax Credit Plan Punishes Working Families
Vice President Kamala Harris recently announced an economic plan for her presidential campaign. A centerpiece is the transformation of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a child allowance. If it became reality, the policy would discourage parental employment and risk harming the long-run prospects of children. These unintended consequences together with the plan’s cost should…