Four years after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by three city police officers and the Black Lives Matter movement led large-scale protests across the country, workplaces across the U.S. economy are dropping their efforts to promote racial diversity, equity, and inclusion, spurred in part by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. This trend is dispiriting for a variety of reasons, not least because it threatens the future competitive strength of our nation’s manufacturing and services industries as they rapidly embrace AI and slowly but steadily adopt solutions to deal with climate cha ..read more

Lessons from new research on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Overview Policymakers are increasingly paying attention to administrative burdens—those “frictions that people face in their encounters with public services.”1 In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration’s Office of Management and Budget launched an ambitious new effort, calling on federal agencies to better characterize and reduce administrative burdens present in public benefit programs as part of the administration’s commitment to advancing racial equity and improving customers’ experiences.2 Yet while some aspects of ..read more

Among the many regressive and ineffective elements of the Trump administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, one provision stands out as the most convoluted, unfair, and ripe for abuse. Section 199A of the Internal Revenue Code delivered a 20 percent deduction to the “qualified business income” of pass-through business owners. Pass-through businesses were already complicated, lightly taxed, and often used for tax avoidance. Section 199A, also known as the pass-through tax cut or qualified business income deduction, made matters worse, though it has been difficult to analyze in a rigorous w ..read more

In recent years, so-called pass-through businesses have taken center stage in a number of crucial tax policy debates. This large and growing category of U.S. business—which includes sole proprietorships, partnerships such as law firms, private equity companies, and hedge funds, and S-corporations such as retail stores, banks, and other private, closely held companies—receive special tax benefits. Pass-throughs also received a large, regressive tax break known as the qualified business income deduction, or the Section 199A deduction, as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Why do these t ..read more

Authors: Zarek Brot-Goldberg, University of Chicago Zack Cooper, Yale University Stuart V. Craig, University of Wisconsin–Madison Lev Klarnet, Harvard University Abstract: From 2002 to 2020, there were over 1,000 mergers of US hospitals. During this period, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took enforcement actions against 13 transactions. However, using the FTC’s standard screening tools, we find that 20% of these mergers could have been predicted to meaningfully lessen competition. We then show that, from 2010 to 2015, predictably anticompetitive mergers resulted in price increases over 5 ..read more

A new report from the National Academy of Science’s Committee on National Statistics is packed with recommendations for building an integrated system of national statistics that can provide accurate and timely measurement of the distribution of income, consumption, and wealth in the United States. Implementing this report’s recommendations would supercharge policymakers’ understanding of U.S. inequality and provide them with critical economic intelligence for steering the U.S. economy. There’s not nearly enough room here to provide a summary of all the panel’s findings, but this column provid ..read more

This issue brief has been excerpted with minor modifications from a more extensive treatment of these issues in “Capital Taxation and Market Power,” to be published in the forthcoming Spring 2024 issue of Tax Law Review, Issue 77, Number 2. Overview Rising market power in the United States and around the world calls for changes to our nation’s international corporate taxation system. The importance of market power today suggests that corporate tax policy should distinguish between normal returns to capital and above-normal returns to capital, the latter of which is a telling indicator of corp ..read more

The nearly 90-year-old federal-state Unemployment Insurance program provides much-needed relief to unemployed workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own and helps to stabilize the U.S. economy during downturns. Through 14 recessions since its enactment as part of the New Deal, most recently the Great Recession of 2007–2009 and the short but sharp COVID-19 recession in 2020, this pivotal income support program remains a cornerstone of our nation’s social infrastructure. Yet despite its strengths, the UI system falls short in serious ways. New U.S. Senate legislation—the Unemploy ..read more

How antitrust enforcement in the United States can improve competition in the U.S. healthcare system to promote more equitable economic growth Overview The U.S. policy landscape is replete with reports from organizations across the political spectrum decrying the lack of competition in hospital markets around the nation and the resulting high prices, mixed quality, and potential drag on labor markets. The COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously accelerated the trend of hospital consolidation and revealed, in the starkest terms, the consequences of this consolidation: reduced capacity to care for cr ..read more

Amid ongoing congressional debate over expanding the Child Tax Credit for U.S. families, it’s important to understand why the fears about the expansion of that tax credit in 2021 were wrong. One of the more prominent concerns voiced at the time was that families who qualified for the expanded tax credit would spend the additional money unwisely, even perhaps using it to buy illicit drugs. These concerns were offensive on many levels. One never hears those same legislators worrying about the spending habits of the families or individuals enrolled in other government programs, such as the mortg ..read more