Category: Uncategorized

Manno for RealClearEducation: Developmental Education: From Catch-Up to Speed-Ahead

Posted on by Alex Terr

Astrid arrived at her community college to pursue a nursing degree with a high school diploma, a part-time job, and a plan. She was told she needed two semesters of noncredit remedial math and English courses before taking classes that counted toward her credential.

She never made it to the anatomy course.

Astrid is not a real person, but her story is. She represents the unspoken student story of American higher education’s developmental—or remedial—education system.

Strong Start to Finish reports that 40% of two-year college students and 25% of four-year students take at least one remedial course, an estimated 3.4 million students.

The result is predictable.

Read more in RealClearEducation

Willett for The Post and Courier: Commentary: Why SC should support risk-based tobacco policy

Posted on by Alex Terr

Over the past two decades, I have dedicated my career to tobacco prevention and smoking cessation, serving in leadership roles with the American Heart Association, the Truth Initiative and state health departments in New York and Ohio. Throughout my career, I have witnessed firsthand how evidence-based approaches — when implemented thoughtfully — can meaningfully shift public health outcomes. Today, I am more convinced than ever that tobacco harm reduction represents exactly this kind of evidence-based opportunity for South Carolina.

Cigarette smoking remains South Carolina’s most persistent and costly public health challenge. Despite decades of progress, more than a half million South Carolinians continue to smoke, leading to more than 7,200 deaths each year. This is not only a burden on the friends and families of smokers; it is also a substantial cost for taxpayers totaling $2.2 billion annually to treat smoking-related illness, with nearly $512 million of that coming from Medicaid.

The facts on smoking cessation are stark. Seventy percent of Americans who smoke want to quit, yet most lack the support systems needed to succeed. For every 100 people attempting to quit through willpower alone, only three to five remain abstinent beyond six months. Even health insurance offers limited help: Most plans cover only two attempts at quitting per year. This helps explain why an estimated 60 percent to 90 percent of adults who try to quit smoking ultimately relapse.

Fortunately, Palmetto State lawmakers have an opportunity to pass legislation that would provide people who smoke with incentives to make what I consider better decisions for their health and alleviate some of the financial burden associated with treating smoking-related illnesses.

Read more in the Post and Courier

Gresser in Politico Pro Morning Trade: USTR outlines goals for critical mineral pact

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

The two conflicting visions don’t add up, said Ed Gresser, a former USTR economist now at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank.

“I don’t think you can say in the State of the Union address that the economy is in really, really great shape and then also say we’re about to have a collapse in the dollar, mass unemployment, inability to service foreign debt, those sorts of things,” Gresser said.

[…]

Read more in Politico Morning Trade. 

Kahlenberg in The Boston Globe: Ending college affirmative action didn’t devastate minority enrollment but only shifted it

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

In fact, racial preferences worsen this exact problem. Richard Kahlenberg, an education expert who supports racial diversity on campus, wrote about “the dirty little secret” of American education in his book “Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges.”

As he notes, “The framework of race-based preferences disproportionately aided upper-middle-class students of color and sustained a system of favoritism for children of alumni, wealthy donors and the offspring of faculty.” Affirmative action produced racial diversity that made it seem as if the admissions system was fair. But to give one example that Kahlenberg cites, the University of North Carolina “had 16 times as many wealthy students as it did students from low-income backgrounds.”

[…]

Read more in The Boston Globe

Supreme Court: Presidents cannot use ‘international emergencies’ as pretexts to create their own tariff systems

Posted on by Alex Terr

FACT: Supreme Court: Presidents cannot use “international emergencies” as pretexts to create their own tariff systems.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. GDP growth, last five years–

2025    2.2%
2024    2.8%
2023    2.9%
2022    2.5%
2021    6.2%

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Having ordered his skeptical platoon to ford a flooding Louisiana river by moonlight, the obstinate, ill-fated captain in folksinger Pete Seeger’s Big Muddy insists that everything will be fine:

    “It’ll be a little soggy, but just keep slogging. We’ll soon be on dry ground …”

It doesn’t work out quite that way.

The Supreme Court’s Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump opinion, released Friday morning, offered the administration an easy way out. By striking down all of last year’s “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” (“IEEPA”) decrees, the Court gave the administration a chance either to (a) quietly liquidate an unpopular experiment, or (b) return to the Constitutionally appropriate approach of asking Congress to pass a tariff bill, as the like-minded Harding and Hoover administrations did in the 1920s. Within a few hours, it made a different choice: emotional denunciations of the court, a legal gamble on an antiquated law meant for a different purpose, and new tariff decrees oscillating up and down between 10% and 15%. As this thrashing around proceeds, a look at how the past year’s tariff binge played out, with Seeger’s piece as a wry optional soundtrack:

GDP growth slows: To start at the top, the administration’s central tariff decree — the now-defunct April 2 “Executive Order 14257” — predicted that tariffs would open a “new golden age.” In practice, the U.S. economy grew by 2.2% last year. This isn’t terrible for a “developed” economy, but is noticeably slower growth than in any of the four Biden years: 6.2% in 2021 during the pandemic rebound, then 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023, and 2.8% in 2024.

… and rural America crashes: Growth, of course, isn’t a single uniform figure across all regions and economic “sectors,” but the average of many different experiences. Rural America, the most export-reliant part of the U.S. — sales to foreign customers typically provide a fifth of farm income — has had a particularly bad time. Retaliations and consumer boycotts damaged farm export earnings last year — soybean sales to China down from $12.6 billion in 2024 to $3.1 billion, wine exports to Canada from $460 million to $103 million, etc. — while higher tariffs on fertilizer, agricultural machinery, fencing, tools, and other needs raised farm operating costs. With income down and expenses up, farm country is in bad enough shape for commodity-group and ag policy veterans to warn this month of a possible “widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities.”

Trade balance unchanged: The administration justified its April 2 decree to the courts by declaring a “national emergency posed by a large and persistent trade deficit” (in goods specifically, excluding services trade), and claiming a big tariff increase would “address” it. It hasn’t. Last Thursday, a day before the Supreme Court’s verdict, Census Bureau statisticians published the U.S. trade data for 2025, which showed a somewhat higher goods-trade deficit in 2025 than in 2024:

2024   2025
Imports of goods $3.30 trillion   $3.44 trillion
Exports of goods $2.08 trillion   $2.20 trillion
Goods trade balance -$1.22 trillion   -$1.24 trillion

Manufacturing slowdown: The administration’s pitch to the public was more practical: higher tariffs would cause “some pain,” but would compensate by launching a manufacturing boom.  That didn’t happen either. Employment growth slowed in general, and especially so in manufacturing: Bureau of Labor Statistics reports show manufacturing employment falling by 108,000 in 2025, mainly because manufacturers hired about 330,000 fewer new workers. Meanwhile, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates that the manufacturing share of U.S. GDP (based on the nine months of data available so far) contracted from 9.8% in 2024 to 9.4%.

Costs up: If tariffs haven’t produced growth, trade balance, or a manufacturing job surge, they have succeeded in raising costs. CBP appears to have collected a bit more than $260 billion in tariff money last year, more than triple the $76 billion of 2024. The biggest cost appears to have fallen on the automotive industry — over $40 billion on cars and parts, mostly under “national security” (technically, “Section 232”) tariffs that so far haven’t faced court challenge and thus remain in place. But the general tariff increase is seeping into daily life in unexpected and sometimes very personal ways. Some samples of where CBP got this money:

2024   2025
Primary health products
OTC medicines     $0 million     $316 million
Band-Aids and other bandages     $0 million     $206 million
Condoms     $0 million         $7 million
Tampons   $23 million     $143 million
Crutches, splints, other fracture devices   $0 million     $197 million

 

Personal care & beauty 2024   2025
Soap   $31 million     $172 million
Makeup $158 million     $724 million
Perfume   $11 million     $391 million
Hair care   $28 million     $140 million
Deodorant     $6 million       $17 million
Shaving cream, razors, & aftershave   $12 million       $63 million
Dental floss, toothbrushes, & toothpaste   $20 million     $100 million

 

Groceries                  2024   2025
Fresh fruit and vegetables                  $196 million    $1,175 million
Flowers                      $8 million       $145 million
Coffee & tea                      $6 million       $935 million
Honey                      $4 million         $64 million
Pepper, cinnamon, ginger                    $16 million       $128 million

Across the whole economy, the Harvard Business School’s tracking project estimates that tariffs raised the price of tariffed goods by 6.6% above trend, the price of similar locally produced goods by 3.8%, and overall prices by about 1%.

Federal debt up: As to federal finances, the Court’s ruling doesn’t mean the administration has to pay the whole $261 billion back, just most of it. The Congressionally authorized “MFN” tariff system is still active, though buried under much larger tariff decrees, and legally raises about $40 billion a year. The administration’s Section 232 “national security” decrees are often laughable — one defines condensed milk and balance beams as “steel or aluminum derivative products,” another says lumber tariffs will make sure we have the wood needed to build “ballistic missile defense systems” and “thermal protection systems for nuclear re-entry vehicles” — but so far haven’t faced legal challenge. But the “IEEPA” tariffs struck down on Friday account for about two-thirds of tariff revenue, roughly $175 billion, and the administration will have to pay it back with interest. That means the 2025 tariff experiment will likely end up a net loss to the Treasury.

In sum: slower growth, rural crisis, fewer manufacturing jobs, higher costs for families, and more debt for the government. The unfortunate captain in Seeger’s song tells his worried platoon to keep slogging as the water rises. But dry ground is nowhere in sight.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

  • Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
  • Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
  • Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
  • Offer a positive alternative.

Main documents:

Supreme Court Learning Resources, Inc., v. Trump opinion.

… PPI’s comment on the ruling.

… the now-defunct April 2 decree, “Regulating Imports with a Reciprocal Tariff to Rectify Trade Practices that Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits.”

… and its replacement (for now, pending court challenges), a February 20 decree claiming a “balance of payments emergency” to invoke “Section 122” for a 15% worldwide tariff.

Soundtrack:

Seeger’s “Big Muddy.”

Data:

Census Bureau reports imports, exports, and trade balances for 2025.

BEA’s GDP series, with a link to “GDP by Industry.”

The Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service reports on farm income.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics database. Use “Employment, Hours, and Earnings” for employment growth by industry, and “Job Openings and Labor Turnover” for total job openings, hiring, layoffs, and quits.

The U.S. International Trade Commission’s Dataweb lets you see exports, imports, and tariff collection by country and product.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

Osborne in Washington Monthly: Could New Orleans Be the Model for Fixing Public Schools?

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

In 2003, New Orleans public schools were among the worst in the country. Seventy percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in math, 74 percent weren’t proficient in English, and the graduation rate was barely over 50 percent. Moreover, the district was as corrupt as it was incompetent. FBI investigations led to the indictment of two dozen school officials; nearly $70 million in federal funding was missing.

New Orleans schools have since achieved a remarkable transformation. In 2023, the high school graduation rate was 79 percent, and 65 percent of graduates enrolled in college—nearly double what it was in 2004 and higher than the state average.

This success, one expert argues, was powered by the city’s commitment to charter schools. Publicly funded and but independently operated, charter schools enjoy more autonomy than traditional public schools in what they teach and how they teach it. Their charters, however, are dependent on their performance, which author and director David Osborne says is key.

In his new documentary, Turnaround, which premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival last fall, Osborne chronicles the rise of New Orleans public schools through its use of charters and argues for the expansion of this model. Osborne is the author of six books, including the 1992 bestseller, Reinventing Government.

Watch or listen to the full podcast on Spotify, YouTube and iTunes, or read the transcript in Washington Monthly.

Moss for ProMarket: The Nexstar-Tegna Merger Will Raise Your Cable Bill, and Then Some

Posted on by Alex Terr

Last fall, local broadcast television station owners Nexstar and Tegna announced a $6.2 billion merger. The deal will vault the first and third largest local TV station owners in the United States into the top slot, opening a yawning gap between the size of Nexstar-Tegna and the next largest station owner, Gray Television. The resulting behemoth will control about 265 full-power TV stations, capable of reaching larger regional areas, as compared to lower-power stations. These stations operate in the vast majority of states and in over 60% of local markets, or designated market areas (DMAs). Its national audience reach will top over 80% of U.S. households.

The myriad ways in which a single, powerful TV station owner will touch the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans are stunning. By eliminating major, head-to-head competition in local TV, the merger will tilt bargaining power in markets all along the supply chain. This risks higher subscription prices for multi-video programming (MVP) services that carry local TV stations; higher TV advertising rates for local businesses; and the erosion of diversity of political, social, and cultural viewpoint in local news reporting and content.

In any other political administration, Americans could have counted on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to ensure that the Nexstar-Tegna merger never made it out of the boardroom or, alternatively, was dead on arrival at the agencies’ doorsteps. Not so under the Trump administration. The deal is papered with opportunism and cronyism that is now the hallmark of a politicized U.S. antitrust enforcement and regulatory system. U.S. consumers will be the big losers.

Read more in ProMarket. 

Jacoby in Background Briefing: As Russia’s War on Ukraine Enters Its Fifth Year, A Report From Kyiv On How the Ukrainians Are Holding Up

Posted on by Alex Terr

Background Briefing with Ian Masters · As Russia’s War on Ukraine Enters Its Fifth Year, How Are Ukrainians Holding Up

 

We begin with the fifth year on Russia’s war on Ukraine beginning today and go to Kyiv to assess how the Ukrainian people are dealing with a bitter winter, constant Russian attacks on civilian targets and a United States under Donald Trump that has cut military and economic support while cozying up to Russia’s ruthless dictator who started this war and appears to have no interest an any real peace short of Ukraine’s capitulation. Joining us is Tamar Jacoby, the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. She was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, before that, the deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. She is the author of Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience and we discuss her article at The Washington Monthly, “Ukraine: Requiem for a Citizen Soldier: My friend, an entrepreneur turned exemplary officer, was killed in action in eastern Ukraine this year. Like his comrades, he knew what he was fighting for.”

Listen to the interview here. 

Assessing a New California Broadband Report

Posted on by Alex Terr

The broadband marketplace is intensely competitive. Cable is taking wireless market share, wireless is taking cable market share, satellite is nipping at the heels of everyone, and consumers are the winners. Broadband pricing has stayed well below the inflationary jumps that have been seen in many other industries/services.

This obvious competition, paired with low inflation, makes a new report from the Public Advocates Office (PAO) of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) all the more curious. The report, “Broadband Competition and Pricing Strategies in California’s Urban Markets,” was based on an interesting new data set that looked at promotional broadband rates in four CA cities by detailed location, and compared those prices to the number of broadband providers and household income at those locations. The report’s goal, using regression analysis, was to show that fewer gigabit providers lead to higher prices and that providers were engaged in digital discrimination. 

We applaud the effort to assemble the data set. However, the analysis makes several fundamental mistakes. First, the pricing analysis left out important variables like population density (which could have easily been added at the census block level). A high-density area is generally cheaper to connect, on a per-household basis. As a result, high-density areas are more likely to attract new providers,  as well as leading existing providers to offer lower promotional rates. Conversely, low-density areas will typically have fewer providers and higher promotional rates. 

Thus, by leaving out density from their analysis, the report potentially found spurious correlations between fewer providers at a location and higher promotional rates. To put it another way, the first sentence of the executive summary says, “Broadband prices in California’s urban markets vary widely depending on the level and type of competition available to households.” But that’s tautologically true because competition was basically the only independent variable in their regression equation (the one exception was income, which we’ll discuss below). And disturbingly, the report even omitted results that did not show the desired correlation between price and competition. The report appendix notes that “Comcast is excluded from the regression analysis because its pricing strategy reflects large, market-wide discounts followed by secondary geographic variation that do not correspond to local competition intensity.” In other words, the Comcast regression did not show the desired results, so the report did not show it. In addition, the report acknowledges (note 37) that its regression analysis produces inconsistent results for Charter.

The second elementary mistake, related to the first, was the repeated confusion between correlation and causation. For example, the report asserts confidently that “San Diego has the most limited competition, with many neighborhoods served by a monopoly gigabit provider.” But as the table below shows, San Diego has half the population density of the other three cities, as well as being hillier. So it might be more accurate to say that out of the four cities, San Diego is the costliest, on a per-household basis, to lay fiber and cable, leading to fewer providers and higher promotional prices. Causality is very different than correlation.

San Mateo Oakland Los Angeles  San Diego
Population density of city (people/sq mile) 8710 7878 8311 4256
Population density of surrounding county (people/sq mile) 1704 2280 2468  784

Data: Census Bureau

Third, the report ignores intense competition in sub-gig markets, which many subscribers are intentionally choosing. As a result, the report only focuses on the four top fixed broadband providers, even though satellite providers, such as Starlink, and 5G internet providers, such as T-Mobile and Verizon, are available in many locations covered by the report. 

Finally, we come to the impact of income, which is the one non-competition variable in the report’s analysis. On its website, the PAO alleges digital discrimination in the California broadband space. However, the analysis in this report shows “providers do not systematically adjust promotional pricing based on income levels” (p 16). Truthfully, the report could have been entitled “No Digital Discrimination Found in California’s Urban Broadband Markets.”

The CPUC should be careful not to rely on this flawed study to make any policy judgments related to broadband. Rather, we should take comfort that the increasingly competitive marketplace for broadband is benefiting consumers. 

PPI Warns State Ticket Resale Caps Could Undermine Antitrust Case and Harm Consumers

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — A new report by Diana Moss, Vice President and Director of Competition Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), warns that proposed state laws capping ticket resale prices and fees could decimate the resale ticket market and undermine federal antitrust enforcement against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. This will deliver a crushing blow to millions of live events fans in the U.S. and to the artists and sports teams that they support.

As the U.S. live music market approaches $20 billion in annual revenue, lawmakers across the country are advancing a wave of ticketing bills. Many of these legislative proposals go well beyond the boundaries of consumer protection to impose invasive economic regulation on the resale ticket market. PPI’s report, “State Regulation of the Resale Ticket Market: Depriving Fans of Choice and Jeopardizing Antitrust Enforcement,” concludes that bills that require transparency in ticket buying and ban deceptive practices will bootstrap competition. In contrast, price controls on resale tickets risk destabilizing the only competitive segment of the ticketing market and harming fans.

PPI’s report explains that that Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s entrenched monopoly is the root cause of dysfunction in the live events ecosystem. The company’s dominance spans control of roughly 75% of concert promotion and exclusive contracts with venues, and about 80% of primary ticketing.

“State legislation to cap resale ticket prices and fees targets the only market with competition, leaving the monopolized and broken primary ticket market to operate unfettered,” said Moss.

The resale market compensates for supply-and-demand imbalances in the primary market that result from underpricing and holding back large swaths of tickets. Imposing state-mandated price and fee caps on resale will only exacerbate Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s monopoly power and risks hobbling the only market where live events fans have real choice.

The PPI report comes as the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 40 states and D.C. pursue a critically important, strong monopolization case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. If successful, the government could seek structural remedies that break up the company to restore competition in primary ticketing. The report emphasizes that nothing short of a fully litigated trial on the merits of the case, and strong remedies, will adequately protect competition and consumers in ticketing.

Moss warns that aggressive state-level resale regulation could complicate that enforcement effort. Government-imposed price caps would distort price discovery, making it more difficult for courts and enforcers to measure monopoly overcharges and consumer harm. State regulation could also trigger a legal doctrine that limits private antitrust damages or constrains federal enforcement.

PPI’s report explains that state legislative proposals overlook the important role of the resale ticket market. Resale allows fans to access tickets that are unavailable in the primary market, recover their costs when plans change, and comparison shop across platforms. While resale ticket prices may rise for high-demand events, they can also fall below face value for lower-demand shows.

State proposals to cap resale prices or fees, the PPI report finds, would create more ticket shortages, increase price volatility, and push ticket buyers back to scammers in the shadow markets that prevailed before the advent of competitive online resale marketplaces. The net result of price cap regulation will steer consumers back to Ticketmaster’s vertically integrated platform, where it can collect monopoly fees on primary and resale ticket purchases.

At the same time, Moss emphasizes that many pending federal and state proposals would meaningfully improve consumer protection and reinforce competition. These include: requiring up-front, all-in pricing throughout the ticket search process; strengthening enforcement against “bots,” speculative tickets, and excessive ticket holdbacks; and protecting ticket transferability so consumers can freely resell their tickets.

“Antitrust enforcement and smart consumer protection should work hand in hand,” said Moss. “Lawmakers should focus on transparency and transferability, not on resale price and fee controls that risk weakening enforcement and depriving fans of competitive alternatives.”

Read and download the report here.

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @ppi. 

###

Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

Manno for Philanthropy Daily: Rebuilding America’s Third Places

Posted on by Alex Terr

Americans’ daily lives have quietly narrowed since the pandemic. We move between home and work but spend far less time in the informal spaces in between. The places where people once lingered, talked, and got to know one another—coffee shops, parks, libraries, recreation centers, diners, church basements, and barbershops—are used less often or have disappeared altogether.

Ray Oldenburg described these settings in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, calling them “third places.” He argued that they are vessels of friendship, citizenship, and the everyday practice of pluralism. They also shape how people connect across income lines, how opportunity travels, and how young people envision their futures.

For foundations and donors focused on opportunity, belonging, and civic health, third places deserve renewed attention, not only as amenities but as essential community infrastructure.

National surveys confirm how much these spaces have shrunk. The American Social Capital Survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life reports that roughly half of Americans rarely visited a park in the past year. Large majorities seldom go to libraries or community centers, especially in low-income and rural communities. There are simply too few places where people can gather without an invitation or membership.

Declining usage is only part of the story. In many communities, third places have physically disappeared entirely. For example, independent retail and service businesses that often serve as community gathering spots have vanished. Retail analysts projected up to 15,000 U.S. store closures in 2025, with closures far outpacing openings and more than 7,300 brick-and-mortar locations shutting in 2024 alone. Membership in many local civic and fraternal organizations has also waned, with lodges and clubs that once anchored neighborhoods shrinking or closing entirely.

Read more in Philanthropy Daily. 

State Regulation of the Resale Ticket Market: Risks to Competition, Fans, and Antitrust Enforcement

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The value of the U.S. live music market is expected to top almost $20 billion in 2026, with ticket sales accounting for 75% of revenues. Live events, which connect fans with beloved musical artists and sports teams through shared experiences, are some of the most exciting for consumers. Yet the Live NationTicketmaster monopoly continues to generate overwhelmingly negative public opinion in the U.S., as fan frustration with a lack of competition in primary ticketing services, sky-high ticket fees, and a dysfunctional primary ticket continues to mount.

This should come as no surprise. Live NationTicketmaster controls the entire live events supply chain. Live Nation commands 75% of the markets for concert promotion and exclusive contracts with venues, and Ticketmaster has an 80% share in ticketing.3 Long overdue attention to Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s anticompetitive conduct in ticketing is, therefore, a welcome development for millions of fans who have paid a high price for the company’s entrenched monopoly power.

This Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) report unpacks the policy tools that are part of federal and state efforts to address competition and consumer protection in ticketing. These developments have the potential to transform the live events ecosystem and will leave an indelible imprint — for better or worse — on consumers, artists, independent venues, and small businesses. For example, the monopolization case filed against Live NationTicketmaster by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 40 states and the District of Columbia could, if successful, lead to a breakup of the company and spur competition in ticketing. This would increase choice, reduce ticket fees, and pressure companies to improve quality.

Another prong of federal-state activity in ticketing is a crop of proposed consumer protection laws designed to increase transparency in ticket pricing and reduce deceptive practices in the primary and secondary (i.e., “resale”) ticket markets. Yet another development is a handful of proposed state laws that seek to impose economic regulation on the resale market while leaving the monopolized primary ticket market to operate free of external controls. These laws would cap prices and fees for tickets resold in the competitive online marketplaces.

Caps on resale ticket prices and fees go well beyond the conventional boundaries of traditional consumer protection. The resale market balances supply and demand for tickets, compensates for inefficiencies in primary ticketing, and provides the only source of competition for millions of music and sports fans. PPI’s report flags the concern that such regulation will significantly disrupt, and even wipe out, the resale market — defeating the goal of promoting competition and protecting fans.

State regulation of the resale ticket market also risks a policy collision with antitrust enforcement. Antitrust is the most effective tool for fixing the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly that is the source of problems in live event ticketing. PPI’s report unpacks the building blocks for understanding these issues and offers four major takeaways for antitrust enforcers and lawmakers.

  • An antitrust “breakup” of the entrenched Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly is essential for restoring competition in the primary ticket market. Any pre-trial settlement would be a failure of enforcement to rid an important market of an entrenched monopoly and to protect competition and consumers.
  • Policies that maintain a viable and robust resale ticket market are essential for protecting and providing choice for live events fans. With no functional resale market, ticket buyers have no place to go but back to Ticketmaster, where they pay monopoly ticket fees.
  • Numerous federal and state legislative proposals advance helpful consumer protection provisions for ticketing. These proposals also bootstrap antitrust enforcement by easing ticket supply constraints and promoting comparison shopping in the competitive online resale marketplaces.
  • State proposals to impose price controls on resale risk hobbling the resale market, creating a patchwork of different state regulations, and interfering with antitrust enforcement. States should model legislation after, or even defer to, federal proposals that avoid price controls and stick expressly to strengthening consumer protection in ticketing.

Read the full report.

 

PPI Applauds Supreme Court Decision to Strike Down Trump ‘Emergency’ Tariffs

Posted on by Max Sherrill

WASHINGTON — Today, Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), issued the following statement on the Supreme Court’s decision deeming President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs unconstitutional:

“A very conservative Supreme Court has done Mr. Trump a favor today, by giving him a chance to quietly liquidate about half of his tariff program. But it has only done part of the job, and Congress now needs to finish it.

“The public’s experience with Mr. Trump’s tariffs hasn’t been a happy one. In January, the administration promised lower prices and industrial growth. Since then, it has used tariffs to deliver higher costs of living to families, factory job loss and lost farm income to industry, and harm to America’s national security and international reputation. It is not a surprise to find such a program deeply unpopular, and the Trump administration should be grateful to the Court for partially scrapping it.

“Today’s decision, though, applies only to tariffs imposed through decrees using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The case did not cover the equally bad-faith ‘national security’ Executive Orders and Proclamations imposing tariffs of 10%, 25%, and 50% on furniture, whipped cream, lumber, gym equipment, metals, and thousands of other products through ‘Section 232’ of U.S. trade law. Barring a future legal challenge, these will remain in place, and so will a problem larger than price increases.

“Like the IEEPA tariffs, the ‘Section 232’ tariffs have no Congressional authorization. So beyond their real-world harm to families and businesses, they usurp Congress’s clear Constitutional authority over the rates of ‘taxes, duties, imposts, and excises,’ and substitute rule by personal decree for rule of law. As such, they represent the same breach of the separation of powers, and the same threat to the Constitution. Congress, in particular Speaker Mike Johnson and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, must now complete the Court’s unfinished work through legislation to terminate the remaining tariff decrees and restore Constitutionally appropriate development of future policy.”

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @PPI.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Ukraine: Requiem for a Citizen Soldier

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Looking back, it should have been obvious—the warning wasn’t subtle. When I texted my friend, the frontline commander I called Fin—I always used his army call sign, not his civilian name—the screen stared back at me ominously: “Last seen January 3, 2026”—at least three weeks earlier. I told myself it was nothing. He’d probably changed his phone number or switched to a different carrier. But my explanations felt thinner and thinner as the hours ticked by. Finally, in the evening, I started texting others who knew him, and the news came the next day from his unit’s press officer: “Code 200. Fin has been killed in action.”

Later that week, still battling shock and grief, I read in the media that Volodymyr Zelensky, long hesitant to reveal casualty figures, had finally gone public with a number. According to the president’s office, 55,000 Ukrainians, volunteers and regular soldiers, have fallen in battle since the Russian invasion in February 2022. This is a tiny fraction of the enemy total. Ukrainian and Western analysts estimate 1.2 million Russians killed, wounded, and missing. But both numbers looked different to me in the stark light of my friend’s sacrifice.

Keep reading in Washington Monthly.

New PPI Report Debunks Claims That Institutional Investors Drive Housing Crisis

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — In the debate over rising U.S. housing costs, large institutional investors are frequently cast as the primary culprits. Indeed, President Donald Trump is threatening to derail bipartisan legislation unless it includes a ban on institutional investors.  Against this backdrop, a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) finds that institutional investors — large entities such as pension funds, insurance companies, and private equity firms — account for just 1% of single-family home purchases and recommends that policymakers improve affordability by other means.

The report, titled “Institutional Investment in Single-Family Housing: Separating Fact from Fiction,” shows that while politicians claim that institutional investors are driving the housing crisis, their footprint in the single-family market remains small. Authored by Richard Kahlenberg, PPI’s Director of Housing Policy and the American Identity Project, and Colin Mortimer, PPI’s Senior Director of Partnerships, the report calls on lawmakers to address the real issues impacting the housing crisis, including zoning reform, expanding housing supply, and reducing restrictive “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) barriers.

“Housing is unaffordable because we haven’t built enough homes, not because institutional investors are buying them up and pricing out Americans,” said Kahlenberg. “Blaming Wall Street may be politically convenient, but it distracts from the real problem: decades of restrictive zoning and supply constraints.”

To address the housing crisis effectively, the report recommends lawmakers enact legislation that:

  1. Streamlines permitting requirements in order to increase housing supply
  2. Loosens exclusionary zoning restrictions in order to build more multifamily housing
  3. Modernizes manufactured and modular housing rules in order to lower construction material costs

The report also assesses that institutional investors can play a constructive role in expanding housing opportunities for working class families. Unlike many small landlords, institutional investors bring professional management, renovate older homes, and add new single-family rental homes to the market.

“Institutional investors, in their small capacity, provide working Americans opportunities to live in better neighborhoods that they couldn’t access before, including better schools, safer streets, and greater economic opportunity,” said Mortimer. “Lawmakers cannot ignore those very real benefits in favor of political posturing.”

Read and download the report here.

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @PPI.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org