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May 7, 2025
Did ‘China Shock’ Throw Millions of Americans Out of Work?
…uses a measure of total employment from Scott Winship, “America Is Still Working,” updated to 2024. (See end note 5 from that paper.) For 1939-2024, the manufacturing employment measure is from…
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…
February 20, 2025
The American Dream Is Not a Coin Flip, and Wages Have Not Stagnated
…Hell, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940.” Replication files available at https://opportunityinsights.org/data/?geographic_level=0&topic=0&paper_id=546#resource-listing. MACPI is from Scott Winship, “Introducing the More Accurate Consumer…
January 16, 2025
Should We Believe the Economic Data or Americans’ “Lyin’” Eyes? The Answer Is Yes.
…living standards have changed over the long run. Scott Winship is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute…
January 7, 2025
Tax Policy Should Prioritize Shoring Up the Family
During the Biden years, tax policy related to the family revolved around the child tax credit (CTC). Attempts to expand the credit to make it easier for two-parent families to…
December 20, 2024
Fixing Inflation, Right-Sizing the Federal Government
Thirty years ago next month, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before a joint session of the House and Senate Budget Committees with talk of deficit reduction in the…
October 11, 2024
It’s time to face up to our social poverty problem
…a check. Only by addressing the erosion of strong social ties can we help the disadvantaged flourish, rather than simply providing them an adequate standard of living. Scott Winship is…
June 18, 2024
Economic Opportunity and Social Mobility
Years ago, I worked at the Pew Charitable Trusts on something called the Economic Mobility Project. In 2009, we commissioned a survey covering opportunity, mobility, and the American Dream. One…
May 30, 2024
The Truth about Trends in Worker Pay
Time was, only progressives made outlandish claims such as that hourly wages have been stagnant for more than half a century. But with the rise of populism on the right, “doomerism”…
March 12, 2024
Family Dinners Offer a Silver Lining in a Bleak Social Capital Landscape
Across a variety of indicators, social capital in America is deteriorating. But one trend appears to be cutting across conventional wisdom—gathering the family around the dinner table. Dinners offer an…