Adam N. Michel The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC), enacted in 2000, was designed to spur investment in low-income communities by offering tax incentives to private investors. Touted as a market-friendly alternative to traditional spending programs, the NMTC has authorized $76 billion in credits over 25 years. Despite repeated temporary extensions and bipartisan support, the program’s track record is marked by ...
Stephen Richer Can mail ballots be lawfully accepted after Election Day if they are postmarked on Election Day? This legal question came up 10 days ago when Federal District Court Judge Denise Casper enjoined parts of President Trump’s March 25, 2025 executive order on election administration. Judge Casper is not the first to rule against the president’s election executive order. On April 24, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly enjoined a ...
Jeffrey Miron Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and suspension of habeas corpus; Roosevelt’s Japanese Internment and confiscation of gold; Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces; Eisenhower’s military support of the Little Rock Nine; and Nixon’s introduction of wage and price controls. All stemmed from a single presidential power: the Executive Order (EO). Although not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, the authority to ...
Gene Healy At the start of this week, if you were “monitoring the situation” via President Trump’s Truth Social feed, you might have assumed the United States was already at war with Iran. On Monday (June 16), Trump demanded the immediate evacuation of Tehran; on Tuesday, he was calling for Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and using the first-person plural to describe ...
Robert A. Levy In earlier posts—February 25, 2025, and May 20, 2025—I examined proposals by President Donald Trump to enlarge his powers and those of the executive branch. Since then, the president has plowed ahead, issuing a barrage of new executive orders. Hence, this addendum to explore topics not previously covered. For the most part, I’ll be addressing the legal and constitutional ...
Chris Edwards The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report comparing policies in its 38 member countries. The OECD is a group of generally high-income democracies, many of which are in Europe. Here are seven charts from the report that compare the countries on government spending and debt. The charts include all levels of government—federal, state, and ...
Walter Olson ICE, our new secret police agency, claims its agents must wear masks and conceal their identities because of a rising risk of violence on the job or home terror attacks. But according to columnist Philip Bump at the Washington Post, ICE refuses to substantiate those claims—and there’s much reason to doubt them. The agency does not publish statistics ...
Colleen Hroncich When parents in her Georgia community saw Christina Jones’s homeschooled children thriving, they were intrigued. They started asking her questions and wondering if they should—and could—homeschool their own children. Christina decided to create learning pods to give other kids some of the creative learning experiences she was providing for her own children. She started with three pods with ...
Stephen Slivinski There are a few safe bets on outrageous online reactions to proposed government policies. Unhinged hyperventilation over very modest proposals to sell federal land seems to be one of them. A recent proposal by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources directs the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to auction off a combined 1 ...
David J. Bier New nonpublic data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicate that the government is primarily detaining individuals with no criminal convictions of any kind. Also, among those with criminal convictions, they are overwhelmingly not the violent offenses that ICE continuously uses to justify its deportation agenda. ICE has shared this data with people outside the agency, who ...