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Here is the Heritage Take on the top issues today. Please reply to this email to arrange an interview.
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- Fewer Americans are planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day in 2024 than in years past.
- Declining celebration of the day may be because fewer Americans are married or in committed relationships—particularly younger adults. And that’s something we should be concerned about, given marriage’s connection with happiness and human thriving.
- The number of Americans who are married has dropped steadily for the past several decades, particularly among those in their 20s. In the 1960s, 90% of 30-year-olds were married. Today, just a little more than 40% of 30-year-olds are married.
- Marriage used to be seen as the cornerstone of adulthood. Couples grew and built a life together. Today, marriage is more often considered a capstone to a yearslong process of personal development and exploration.
- Marriage is associated with numerous benefits, and even having a marriage mindset is linked with positive outcomes.
- More institutions of civil society should take a role in helping people build and maintain healthy marriage relationships.
- High schools, colleges, churches, community organizations, and state and local government can provide education to young adults, helping them gain the confidence and tools to achieve healthy marriages.
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- Foreign funding, while not automatically suspect, flows to U.S. colleges and universities in five primary ways and can exert influence on these institutions.
- Those include direct gifts to institutions, indirect gifts to institutions, foreign student tuition, foreign satellite campuses, and research grants to professors.
- American colleges and universities, supported by American taxpayers, deserve transparency around the sources of foreign funding that may exert influence on these institutions. Enforcing existing transparency requirements, lowering reporting thresholds, and requiring the disclosure of every penny from sources that may threaten American interests are necessary reforms.
- Congress should also work to prohibit both direct and indirect giving from foreign individuals, entities, and governments located in countries of concern. Doing so will strengthen colleges and universities and ensure they are oriented toward best serving American student needs.
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- The global climate regulators at the California Air Resources Board (CARB), working in close collaboration with the Biden Administration, are on a fast march to remake every mode of surface transportation nationwide, now including trucks.
- If CARB succeeds in this effort, the consequences, both for the U.S. economy and for America’s families, will be calamitous.
- The reality is that while the technologies necessary to produce what CARB calls zero-emission trucks are under development, they are not yet practical for real-world use. Zero-emission trucks, like zero-emission locomotives, have yet to prove safe, affordable, reliable, or capable of performing the full range of work tasks required by commercial operators.
- Unless new leadership in Washington commits to a 180-degree change in regulatory policy, the best chance to forestall CARB’s “Green Dream” will lie with the courts.
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