November 19, 2025
Real Estate Red Flag: How Hidden Blue-State Policies are Pricing Out Homeowners
A telling new analysis of rising home maintenance costs from the real estate listing service Zillow, in conjunction with Thumbtack, which tracks the cost of local services, should remind those promoting the virtues of homeownership that it’s key for new buyers to be prepared and capable owners. At the same time, the findings tell yet another story…
October 23, 2025
Childcare Regulation Limits Choice and Opportunity
Regulation limits many aspects of opportunity and upward mobility. While analysts have highlighted the adverse impact of specific regulations — such as zoning, rent control, and occupational licensing — public discourse has given less attention to the costs and consequences of childcare regulations for families and care providers. Yet past and current research underscores these…
October 21, 2025
Childcare Regulation and Affordability
AbstractIn recent decades, childcare costs have outpaced family incomes and put pressure on familybudgets. Legislators typically consider government subsidies to be the primary solution to risingcosts, despite the high cost of broadly subsidizing care and possible adverse effects on familiesand children. Yet policymakers have paid little attention to how existing regulations limit childcaresupply and increase…
October 21, 2025
Reliability of Government Data Often Requires Asterisks, a Hazard That Predates Liberal Gripes About Trump Manipulating Statistics
Seattle slugger Cal Raleigh this year matched what once stood as a signature baseball record: Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs for the 1927 Yankees. Roger Maris first surpassed Ruth’s record, hitting 61 homers in 1961, but for decades his achievement was accompanied in record books by the most famous asterisk in history. Maris played a 162-game season, the asterisk…
September 25, 2025
The Golden Age of Public Housing—and Why It Didn’t Last
If Americans have any shared image of public housing, it is one of dilapidated and even dangerous “projects” and locations of concentrated poverty. But there was a time—a brief shining moment—in which public housing was new and attractive and working married couples with children were glad to live in government-owned and -managed apartments. What might…
September 24, 2025
Subsidized Housing and Upward Mobility
In 1983, Harvard scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood sought to determine the length of time participants in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) spent in the program. Their report, titled The Dynamics of Dependence, revealed that the average participant could be expected to remain in AFDC for 10 years — a figure that increased to…
September 23, 2025
A Second Reconciliation Bill Should Focus On Reducing Deficits
Republicans on Capitol Hill are starting to debate a second budget bill, following the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law by President Donald Trump on the Fourth of July. That law extends and expands the first Trump tax cuts, which overall increase already large deficits projected ahead. Meanwhile, news accounts suggest Republicans are having…
July 16, 2025
An Analysis of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Effect on Student Loans
Key Points Introduction At the beginning of July, President Donald Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), a comprehensive package of reforms to taxes and government spending.1 While the package touches on myriad policy areas, it includes a comprehensive set of reforms to the federal student loan program. These represent some of…
June 24, 2025
Public Housing and Rental Subsidies
Since the 1930s, the federal government has subsidized local housing projects aimed at uplifting the poor. The specific policies have evolved, but the theory has been that federal aid is needed because the states cannot solve their own housing problems and private markets fail to invest in affordable housing. Federal housing efforts are led by…
June 12, 2025
Lingering Absence in Public Schools: Tracking Post-Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism into 2024
Key Points Introduction It has been over five years since the US shut down for COVID, and in many ways, the country has moved past the pandemic. For US schools, however, the pandemic’s toll has not passed so quickly. Student academic achievement remains depressed, and chronic absenteeism continues to hover substantially above the pre-pandemic baseline….