American Enterprise Institute

BY BRENT ORELL Last week, the Department of Labor released the final employment report of the Trump administration, and the news there, much like all the news these days, was not good. For months, I’ve written that the key to getting the economy

BY EDWARD PINTO AND TOBIAS PETER Key takeaways: Purchase rate lock volume remains strongly above last year’s. For the last couple weeks, volume has consistently been about 30%-80% higher. Driven by ultra-low mortgage rates and a limited supply, national HPA

BY JAMES CAPRETTA AND SCOTT GANZ The news that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are 95 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 disease, and the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine might be 90 percent effective (with the right dosage), has given the world a

BY DANIEL A. COX The ritual of going to a place where one is a “regular” is a cherished one. Sarah Firshein of Eater said, “When you’re a regular, you become a creature of habit and ritual, joyously unburdened by the agonies

BY DANIEL LYONS Last week, Comcast announced plans to expand its existing usage-based broadband pricing model to northeastern markets, prompting a fresh wave of criticism by some long-time opponents of the practice. But setting aside these critics’ loaded rhetoric and straw-man arguments, a

BY TOBIAS PETER The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a distressing fact in the housing world: Federal home loan policies that promote risky lending in the name of providing “responsible, affordable mortgage credit access” for minority households are setting up minority

BY JAMES C. CAPRETTA AND SCOTT GANZ The global campaign to identify effective vaccines against COVID-19 has entered the final stage of testing for regulatory approval—Phase III trials—for several promising candidates. Evaluation will be guided by criteria established by the

BY DEREK SCISSORS Key Points Partial decoupling from China is overdue. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) suppresses foreign competition and infringes intellectual property. It is an ugly dictatorship at home and increasingly aggressive overseas. Decoupling involves a range of

BY MATT WEIDINGER State unemployment insurance (UI) programs typically offer laid-off workers up to 26 weeks of benefits that replace, on average, nearly half their pre­vious wages. Except for the brief recession in 1980, in every recession since 1957, Congress

BY DEREK SCISSORS President Trump should stop talking about China and act. First-quarter trade numbers show his “phase one” deal is a non-starter for 2020, not to mention dwarfed by COVID. The president’s elevation of selling more to China above everything else has frozen

BY JAMES PETHOKOUKIS The famous Doomsday Clock — it’s a key visual motif in the Watchmen graphic novel and television miniseries — was created by Manhattan Project scientists as a metaphor to suggest how close mankind might be to global catastrophe, originally atomic war.

The American Enterprise Institute released a report last week that details the benefits of consumer choice in education. The report’s key findings are as follows: Despite overall declines in college enrollment, various accredited and unaccredited providers of postsecondary education delivery are

BY DEREK SCISSORS “Fact sheets” are public relations efforts. So it’s telling that the fact sheet for the US-China trade deal announced last week is not convincing — phase 1 is in fact a small deal. The twist: small is beautiful in

BY KARLYN BOWMAN In this issue of AEI’s Political Report, we examine interest in the presidential campaign, how Democrats are thinking about the Democratic contest, whether their minds are made up, and how the general election looks 13 months out.

BY R. GLENN HUBBARD To frame any discussion of the effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) and next steps for tax reform, it is important to remember the evolution in economic thinking and economic policymaking

BY SAMUEL J. ABRAMS As a college professor who teaches courses about politics and geography at an extremely progressive liberal arts college, my students regularly want to talk about the narratives surrounding deep urban-rural divides which routinely make the news or the seemingly

BY DANIEL A. COX Most Americans believe that political differences do not preclude agreement on other topics. Nearly six in 10 (59 percent) Americans say that when people have different views about politics, it does not generally indicate how much