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.
Regulators at both the NLRB and Department of Labor have recently rolled back Trump-era employment status rules. To an outsider, these changes can seem pedantic and inconsequential. A political economy perspective, however, reveals a deeper logic to the new rules, which address three pernicious trends in employment classification — the ability of businesses to manipulate the inherent ambiguity in treating employment like a contract, the ascension of the ideology of human capital, and the norm of the arbitrage economy.
A little-known Reagan-era competition rule continues to block innovative policy efforts by state and local governments. By re-interpreting this rule, the Biden Administration can empower local communities to help build a sustainable economy.
Free speech at universities hangs in the balance. But defending it will require much more than just resisting the assaults coming from billionaires and right-wing influencers. It will require reconnecting with the purposes and highest aims of the academy and building a political economy of higher education that can begin to truly deliver on them.
Some people head to the pumpkin patch. Others drink from the unholy fountain of the pumpkin spice latte. But here at the Blog, our favorite autumnal activity is decidedly less gourd-based: we scour the internet for the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, labor, housing, the administrative state, criminal justice, family law, religious freedom, finance, legal theory, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
Collective bargaining agreements offer the chance to proactively build in protections for federal workers that will be vital if a dangerously anti-administrative candidate like Trump or DeSantis takes office. But to take advantage of this opportunity, agency leadership must be conciliatory and collaborative in negotiations.
This past year, Jackson has been the site of two separate yet related crises: a failed water system that has left approximately 150,000 residents without access to safe drinking water, and the takeover of the city’s police and court functions by white officials in the state government. Assessed together, these two episodes offer lessons about the challenges of local self-governance in a country awash with material inequality and the importance of pursuing political equality across as well as within jurisdictions.
Louise Seamster, Blake Emerson, Marshall Steinbaum, Ryann Liebenthal, Jonathan Glater, Persis Yu, and Luke Herrine offer their initial reactions to the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation program.
Despite receiving more revenue from the U.S. government than from private donors, the nonprofit sector is often cast as an independent realm that stands apart from both state and market. This picture is not merely misleading, but dangerous, as it naturalizes the idea that the needs of certain citizens are best met by private supplement, rather than by more expansive, more equal government provision.
OIRA’s proposed update to its notorious Circular A-4 incorporates a long list of improvements. But let’s not get too caught up in the moment. The update represents a recalibration, rather than a rejection or rethinking, of that basic framework.
Last month, the Biden Administration released a long-awaited overhaul of the regulatory review process. Although these changes are aimed at a highly technical and behind-the-scenes process, their importance is hard to overstate. From lowering the social discount rate, to providing a method for income weighting, to incorporating hard-to-quantify impacts into agency decision-making, these revisions will affect government policymaking across nearly every domain. They also signal overdue recognition that an inclusive political economy requires a transformation not just in the substance of public policy, but also in its process, in the machinery of how policy is designed, analyzed, coordinated, and ultimately made impactful.
Six money and banking experts offer their initial reactions to the Silicon Valley Bank debacle.
