American Enterprise Institute

Just how long is “as long as it takes?”

Unless the House of Representatives surprises us upon its return to Washington next week with a vote on the supplemental bill providing military assistance to Ukraine, we may soon know the answer: less than two years.

On September 12, AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley and a panel of experts discussed the latest survey research on adoption and how policymakers and adoption agencies can help birth parents understand the current adoption landscape in a post-Dobbs world.

Amid its ongoing military buildup, Beijing recently announced a 7.2 percent increase in its defense budget for 2024—reaching a new record. This plentiful military budget hike is the latest in a 20-year long streak of China’s hefty annual defense spending increases that far outpace America’s spending handcuffs, fits-and-starts, and delayed enactment of military spending.

The pandemic exposed dysfunctional cities like San Francisco and New York. In the years since the initial covid lockdowns, “opportunity metros” between the coasts have flourished in the wake of this urban mismanagement.

It is easy to overstate the minimum wage’s relevance as a source of low‐​wage workers’ wage gains.

Can private philanthropy bail out New York City?

Late last year, Mayor Adams pleaded with wealthy New Yorkers to help fill the gaps in the City’s budget.

“This is . . . an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Adams said at a Police Athletic League luncheon. “I’m going to need you more than ever to support many of these organizations like PAL, Robin Hood Foundation, and others.”

In this year’s extenders package, lawmakers are likely to address two tax provisions related to the treatment of business investment. They should avoid making these policies temporary and retroactive.

The post Lawmakers Should Avoid Temporary and Retroactive Tax Policy appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.

The current campus demonstrations are a reminder that of all the mossy clichés and puffed-up pieties of polite (and impolite) American discourse, the sanctity of protest is the hardest to question.

Doubting the loftiness of protest invites elite scorn more than any other skepticism about a constitutional right. Proposing limits on free speech, for example, attracts far less outrage. Indeed, people question free speech all the time: in debates about “hate speech,” campaign finance, social media, and more. (Let’s not even get into the fashionableness of questioning Second Amendment rights.)

On May 2, AEI hosted the launch of Lives Cut Short, a project of AEI and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) dedicated to documenting child fatalities from maltreatment in the US and understanding the circumstances and policy failures that led to them.

In 2002, I became a fifth-grade teacher at the lowest-performing public school in the South Bronx, New York City’s lowest-performing school district. A mere 16 percent of PS 277 students could read at grade level. The first charter schools were just opening up in the neighborhood back then; there were virtually no alternatives to the schools that had failed children for decades.

In the pandemic’s wake, we need good information on how students and schools are faring. But no one wants to sacrifice learning time or human connection in the name of endless test-taking. Here are three points to consider.

The post Rethinking School Testing After the Pandemic appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.

Reviewing Tim Carney’s new book Family Unfriendly, Robert VerBruggen cautions against going too far with aid to stay-at-home parents: “U.S. tax and entitlement policy is already quite favorable to breadwinner households — who generally receive a “marriage bonus” from the income-tax system and extra Social Security benefits to support the non-working spouse — and further reforms should bear these existing features in mind.”

“Is it morally wrong to have a baby outside of marriage?”

Recent research suggests that wages below legally established minimum wages are surprisingly prevalent. This column reviews ‘wage theft’ in the US and its impact on the wage gains workers might otherwise enjoy. Most firms comply with increases in the minimum wage, especially when they have time to plan for the increase, but evasion and avoidance are also qualitatively important features of the low-wage labour market. Young African American workers experience the largest erosion of their potential wage gains following a minimum wage increase. Whether greater enforcement would improve the welfare of low-wage workers, however, remains an open question.

Mere months into his new administration, U.S. President Joe Biden told a Rose Garden press conference that he was “pleased that Iran has continued to agree to engage in discussions, in direct discussions with us and with our partners on how we move forward and what is needed to allow us to move back” into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal. It was his clearest statement, as president, about the Iran policy he was committed to pursue.

In a surprise move, the Biden administration limited eligibility for its previously announced student loan jubilee—potentially leaving up to four million borrowers expecting relief out to dry.

The post White House Rescinds Student Loan Forgiveness for as Many as Four Million Borrowers appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.

Russian President Vladimir Putin lies.

With abandon, ecstatically.

“There are no Russian troops in Crimea!” he said as spetsnaz units were occupying the peninsula in March 2014.

“Russia will never start a war on Ukraine!” he repeated virtually up to the invasion two years ago.

Putin’s annual state-of-Russia address last week was no different. (Moscow is “not the one who started the war in Donbas,” the Kremlin’s master said.)