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AEI's weekly digest of top commentary and scholarship on the issues that matter most

Achieving a Durable Peace

Nobody’s Plan Will End the Ukraine War

October 26, 2024

For the past few months, the military situation in Ukraine has steadily deteriorated. As the West searches for a path to victory, or at least a decent peace, Hal Brands explains why neither Donald Trump’s, Kamala Harris’s, nor Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plans can credibly bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion.

 

 

Trump and Harris are similarly uninterested in seriously addressing our most significant domestic challenge: the growing national debt. Writing in the Financial Times, Michael R. Strain explores the disastrous costs of ignoring this problem over the next four years.

 

In contrast, energy policy has been a major issue for both campaigns. In a symposium on the election and regulatory policy, Benjamin Zycher warns that both candidates’ policies, for different reasons, could undermine domestic fossil fuel production.

 

Despite the failures of the federal public health bureaucracy during the pandemic, there has been little political interest in institutional reform. Scott Gottlieb argues that Congress can revitalize the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by refocusing it on its original mission.

 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States continues to attract criticism for its seemingly expansive definition of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. In a new AEI report, Gary J. Schmitt and Joseph Bessette use founding-era history to make sense of the opinion’s distinction between “official” and “unofficial” acts.

 

 

Poverty, Hardship, and Government Transfers

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted significant temporary expansions of government transfer programs to low-income Americans, including the child tax credit (CTC), economic impact payments, and unemployment insurance. In a new working paper, Bruce R. Meyer and coauthors assess how these changes affected the economic well-being of low-income Americans from 2020 through 2022. The authors find that while income poverty declined in 2020 and 2021, followed by a sharp increase in 2023 as these programs expired, consumption-based poverty steadily declined throughout these years thanks to savings patterns and consumption smoothing. While measures of financial and food hardship did increase in 2022, their findings suggest this was not due to the expanded CTC expiring.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

In light of already substantial marriage penalties and growing evidence that marriage matters for low-income families and communities, conservatives should rethink policy recommendations that would make our tax code less marriage friendly.

Kevin Corinth