In the wake of their recent defeat, Democrats’ natural tendency will be to concede the issue of immigration to Republicans and embrace cruelty-lite versions of their opponents’ positions — a strategy that is bound to fail. Instead, Democrats need to offer their own agenda for immigration and internal migration. To do so, they should look to institutional experiments from a forgotten past.
Though the urban-rural divide can sometimes appear like a primordial fault line in American political life, it is a relatively recent development. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside was the predictable consequence of decisions to prioritize certain constituencies to the neglect of others, as it championed the shift to the metropolitan knowledge economy.
The articles, blogs, exit polls, charts, tweets, and skeets that have been helping us make sense of the 2024 election.
Faced with increasingly dire housing challenges, tenants and organizers have called on federal administrative agencies to impose rent regulations, curb discriminatory screening practices, and limit the grounds for eviction. But will such regulations survive in a post-Chevron world? And, if not, might they nevertheless serve long-term fair housing goals?
Recent years have witnessed a sea change in consumer protection, ushered in by a new generation of enforcers who reject many of the basic premises from the neoliberal era. They aim not merely to ensure that consumers have the information necessary to discipline firms through choice, but to prevent businesses from using their power to shape markets in ways that take advantage of consumers.
How the encroachment of private capital into the broadband ecosystem threatens local provision and the goal of universal, affordable broadband.
The Supreme Court’s recent administrative law decisions represent a fundamental shift in both political and economic power. In response, we must not settle for simply restoring the status quo ante. Instead, the task for an LPE approach to the administrative state requires answering a more foundational question: what would effective, equitable, and democratic governance look like?
The rapidly worsening home insurance crisis is often understood as primarily a problem for insurers. Yet the overarching policy question should not be, “how do we save the home insurance industry from collapsing?” but rather, “what role should insurance markets play in the broader suite of policies to keep people safely housed?”
While recent conventional wisdom has held that it is futile to organize voters around debt relief, a longer view reveals that there is nothing inevitable about the lack of debtor mobilization. Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, debtors repeatedly demanded protection in times of economic distress — a history that contains important lessons for our present moment.
Of the estimated 350,000 chemicals now on the global market, only a handful have been properly tested. And as the looming crises with forever chemicals and micro-plastics make clear, we are only just beginning to grasp the enormous toll that these novel entities are taking on human health. How did our environmental law allow this to happen? And what can be done to correct it?
The Biden Administration’s recent foray into industrial policy relies heavily on voluntary inducements to push firms to invest in renewable energy technology and domestic manufacturing. Some observers argue that this approach, commonly known as “derisking,” will yield paltry results: firms will pursue the same priorities they would have absent the legislation, just with a better financial return. Yet subsidies do not only alleviate risk; they also impose a new risk of falling behind competitors, and so mold the landscape of profitability into a disciplinary force itself.
On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission enacted one of the most significant regulations of the Biden years: a comprehensive ban on non-compete clauses. Now the FTC must defend its rule in court.
Nonprofit hospitals frequently deploy administrative hurdles to prevent low-income patients from receiving legally-mandated financial assistance. As a result, patients who should have qualified for assistance instead have billions of dollars of debt placed on their credit reports or sold to aggressive collectors. The IRS could mitigate this cruel practice by clarifying that hospitals are required to proactively screen patients for eligibility before issuing any bill.
Despite the outsized attention afforded to a handful of elite, private colleges, most students attend public institutions within 50 miles of their home. The recent curriculum wars in different states, as well as disparities in state-level funding, mean that where one lives will play an increasingly important role in both the accessibility and content of higher education.
Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act, which slashed the highest marginal tax rate from 50 to 28 percent, was one of the largest and most regressive tax cuts in the history of the United States. New research shows that it also caused an increase in campaign contributions among the wealthy – demonstrating how rising economic and political inequality reinforce one another through public policy.
