December 12, 2024
Senate Special Committee on Aging Hearing on Empowering People with Disabilities to Live, Work, Learn, and Thrive
Introduction: Chairman Casey, Ranking Member Braun and members of the committee, thank you for theopportunity to testify on the critical issues facing aging and disabled members of the Americanworkforce. I’d like to frame my remarks on this topic in two different but interrelated dimensionsof concern: the practical demands of the American economy and the moral…
December 5, 2024
More High-Skill Immigration Is Popular. Let’s Act on That
This might be one of the most underappreciated facts of American public opinion: As controversial as the subject of immigration is, high-skill immigration isn’t controversial at all. A Pew Research Center poll in September found 71 percent of Donald Trump supporters and 87 percent of Kamala Harris supporters favored admitting more high-skilled immigrants. Likewise, a survey last summer from…
December 5, 2024
Inflation Reduction Act Offers a General Lesson against Industrial Policy
With President Trump’s stunning return to power, Congress has the opportunity in 2025 to enact additional business tax cuts. One of their specific goals should be to make “full expensing” of business investment a permanent part of the tax code. By allowing businesses to deduct the full cost of investment in the year the spending…
December 2, 2024
Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation
Abstract We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological progress inherently impossible in construction. What stopped it? We present…
November 27, 2024
Finally, a Win for Working Men
Since the 1970s, working men, particularly those without college degrees, have experienced lower employment rates, increased social isolation and growing health risks. Today, we are starting to see early signs that this problem may be abating. But lately, men have started going back to work. During most recessions, the male employment rate falls and never returns…
November 25, 2024
Don’t Write Off Workforce Pell Grants
Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, a former administrator of the Small Business Administration, is a proponent of expanding Pell Grants to short-term workforce education programs. In a September op-ed, McMahon boosted the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which would allow students to use Pell Grants for high-quality workforce education programs as short as eight weeks in duration (the…
November 21, 2024
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work
Summary Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to improve productivity significantly, but there are many questions about how AI could affect jobs and workers. Recent technical innovations have driven the rapid development of generative AI systems, which produce text, images, or other content based on user requests – advances which have the potential to complement…
November 19, 2024
A Trump Boom?
Donald Trump’s stunning and decisive return to power makes it official: We live in the Age of Trump. The 2008 global financial crisis was a turning point in history, and it is now clear that Trump is the dominant political figure of the post-crisis period. Trump began his rise to power in 2015 and has…
November 19, 2024
Low-Rise Multifamily and Housing Supply: A Case Study of Seattle
Abstract We provide an in-depth case study of land use reforms in Seattle to highlight how redevelopment of aging single-family housing to townhomes can lead to a significant increase in market-rate housing that promotes affordability. The key is to allow market forces to use by-right zoning to drive small-scale development, when also supported by clear…
November 17, 2024
Affordable Housing—and No Tax Hike
On Nov. 5, Denver’s voters rejected Affordable Denver, a half-cent sales tax increase for subsidized housing. The tax hike would have burdened working families while failing to address the root causes of unaffordable housing. But the vote’s outcome opens the door for a better solution — not only in Denver but also in other Colorado…