A paper by Diana Moss of the Progressive Policy Institute likewise found that the Biden administration “made progress in invigorating merger enforcement in some areas but may be lagging behind in others.”
Moss, a former head of the American Antitrust Institute, told me the neo-Brandeisians’ error is to view antitrust policy “not as law enforcement but as a broad policy tool for fixing a lot of problems—economic, political, and social.” Antitrust enforcement isn’t that powerful, for the simple reason that corporate concentration is not the root cause of every problem.
[…]
Biden’s antitrust enforcers were also wrong to believe that their Democratic predecessors had ignored all factors other than costs to consumers. Although Lynn criticized “the more modern consumer welfare standard,” Moss writes in a forthcoming paper, he misunderstood “what the standard was and what it could restrain—information that was indelibly imprinted on Lynn’s mentees.”
WASHINGTON (May 22, 2026) — To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and in advance of Memorial Day, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and its sister organization, the Center for New Liberalism (CNL), today announced three winners of their essay contest “What It Means to be an American: Voices of a New Generation.”
These essays, written by members of CNL chapters across the country, come at a time when younger generations embrace an overall negative opinion of the country. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, just 18% of 18- to 34-year-olds in this country say they are extremely proud to be American, compared with 50% of adults over 55.
“At a time when there is a steep generational divide over support for democracy and a belief in America, these three essays offer inspiration and hope for the future,” said Richard Kahlenberg, Director of PPI’s American Identity Project. “These young writers demonstrated that the seeds of a reflective patriotism are very much alive and well in America’s young people.”
Each essay offers a patriotic vision of the country from which all Americans can draw inspiration:
Jaxson Shealy, the first-place winner, originally from Coppell, Texas, and now living in Washington, D.C., highlighted how his great-grandfather’s journey fleeing religious persecution and seeking refuge in the U.S., as he arrived to Ellis Island, just like countless other Americans in the early 20th century did, showed that American identity is defined more by shared creed than by ancestry or ethnicity.
Ed Weinberg, the second-place winner from Philadelphia, recounted how his experience moving from the U.S. to Vietnam revealed what it truly meant for him to be an American, as no other country is able to integrate as many different cultures into one nation.
Armand Halbert, the third-place winner from Chicago, wrote that watching his father serve 30 years in the U.S. Air Force taught him the importance of being loyal not to politicians, but to the Constitution of the United States and the democratic practices it upholds.
As Americans across the country celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is paramount that Democrats embrace national pride. These essays prove that there is an appetite for patriotism on the center-left, and it is up to the Party not to allow those on the right to define what it means to be an American.
“For years, Democrats have let Republicans monopolize the language of patriotism, defining national pride in ways that are often exclusionary and backward-looking. But the essays in this collection show there’s room for a more expansive vision of what loving your country means,” said Colin Mortimer, Founder and Director of CNL. “At the Center for New Liberalism, we’re committed to reclaiming that narrative. Patriotism means building an economy that works for everyone, through better jobs, affordable housing, quality education, and real opportunity for mobility. That’s the kind of country-loving we should be talking about.”
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 at @ppi.
In the digital age, all politics is national. Just ask United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who may lose his job following the Labour Party’s sweeping losses in his country’s May 7 local elections.
Less than two years ago, Starmer led Labour’s triumphant return to power with a big parliamentary majority after 14 years in political exile. By ejecting over 1,300 Labour local officials, U.K. voters showed they’ve already lost patience with his government’s inability to deliver the change they expected.
Winning big was the U.K. Reform Party, headed by the flamboyant Brexiteer and MAGA fanboy Nigel Farage. Reform racked up about 1,400 municipal councilors and won 25 percent of the popular vote to Labour’s 20 percent, making it for now Britain’s most popular party.
The populist right’s vault to the top of Britain’s political table captured global headlines. But the election told another story that may have more lasting significance: The fragmenting of U.K. politics and possible end to a long era of two-party dominance.
That mirrors trends all across Europe. Governing parties that brought stability and coherence to electoral competition after World War II are imploding. The crumbling of traditional allegiances amid rising populist ferment feels like the birth pangs of a new political order.
The key rationale for public education in the United States is, in the words of educator Albert Shanker, to “teach children what it means to be an American.” By that, he meant the shared values found in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This practice serves two purposes: it transmits an appreciation for the values of liberal democracy, which are not inborn and need to be taught to each generation anew; and it provides the glue necessary to hold together a people of astonishingly different racial, ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological backgrounds.
By this measure, educators need to be doing a better job. In a 2023 YouGov poll, 31% of youth ages 18-29 agreed that “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and Americans should explore alternative forms of government” (compared to only 5% of those over 65). Likewise, a 2025 Gallup survey showed just 53% of those ages 18-29 agreed that “democracy is the best form of government,” compared with 80% of older Americans. As Danielle Allen of Harvard University put it: “You can’t have a democracy unless people want one. And right now, the kids don’t particularly want a democracy.”
Young Americans are also less bound together by a common pride in their country. In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 18% of 18- to 34-year-olds said they were “extremely proud to be American,” compared with 50% of adults over 55.5 A recent Democracy Fund poll asked Americans if the Founders were better described as “heroes” or “villains.” Only one in 10 Baby Boomers said “villains,” while four in ten Gen Z respondents did.
Given the stark generational divide that has emerged over a commitment to democracy and belief in America, it’s particularly inspiring to read the three essays of young Americans found in this report.
In this, the 250th year since the nation’s founding, the American Identity Project of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) partnered with its sister organization, the Center for New Liberalism (CNL), to sponsor a nationwide essay contest on what it means to be an American today. The American Identity Project, whose advisory board is co-chaired by David Brooks and William Galston, is making recommendations about how to strengthen a shared American identity in an era of deep division. The Center for New Liberalism is a grassroots organization of young pragmatic liberals with more than 80 local chapters worldwide.
The three winners of the contest — Jaxson Shealy (a Gen Z, originally from Coppell, Texas, and now living in Washington D.C.), Edward Weinberg (a millennial, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), and Armond Halbert (a millennial, of Chicago, Illinois) — offer heartfelt and stirring accounts that embody a reflective (rather than knee-jerk) American patriotism.
Shealy speaks to the special role of immigrants in shaping what it means to be an American. Over the years, as immigration quotas were abolished, “it became possible for nearly anyone on Earth to become an American, a feature unique to our national identity.” He tells the story of his great-grandfather, who fled religious persecution in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to begin “a life where opportunity outpaced subordination, civil protections existed for religion and free speech, and freedom stood as the highest virtue.” America had (and has) its problems and its tensions, but the liberal democratic system “channeled conflict into argument rather than bloodshed.”
Weinberg, paradoxically, discovered what it means to be an American by moving abroad. He had thought of himself primarily as a writer, a Jew, and a resident of New Jersey; he “didn’t know I was American until I moved to Vietnam.” There, when he told residents he came from the United States, “their eyes would light up. They wanted to study there. They had a cousin there. They loved the TV show Friends.” Having traveled to 40 countries, Weinberg says no one “better integrates as many different cultures as the U.S.,” by incorporating minority voices into the national dialogue rather than crushing dissent. The U.S. can and should teach about our nation’s crimes in school, Weinberg says, but also that it’s a country that has saved millions of lives annually through its aid programs.
Halbert, meanwhile, reflects upon how being the son of a U.S. military officer helped teach him what it means to be an American. His father served in the Air Force for 30 years and swore loyalty not to any president, but to the country. It’s a lesson all of us should take in, Halbert says, especially when our chosen candidate for the nation’s chief executive loses. “Democracy is not a single moment of victory or defeat,” he writes, “but an ongoing conversation among citizens about the kind of society we want to build together.”
Taken together, the three essays remind us that an abiding patriotism can be found in the Democratic as well as the Republican Party. And yet that is not how the public sees it. Democrats suffer a patriotism deficit in American politics. A November 2024 PPI poll found working-class voters believed Republicans were the more patriotic party by a 19-point margin.
Shealy, Weinberg, and Halbert offer a positive vision from which Democrats, and all Americans, can learn. Indeed, we hope these essays will spark broader discussions among young people and Americans of all ages about what it means to be an American. To that end, this report’s afterword, written by CNL’s cofounder and director, Colin Mortimer, lays out some specific plans for how the conversation can continue throughout the 250th anniversary of our country, and beyond.
A brief macabre parable from “Legalist” writer Han Fei-tzu (Warring States-era China, ~250 B.C.E.):
“The carriage maker making carriages hopes that men will grow rich and eminent; the carpenter fashioning coffins hopes that men will die prematurely. It is not that the carriage maker is kind-hearted and the carpenter a knave. It is just that if men do not become rich and eminent, the carriages will never sell, and if men do not die, there will be no market for coffins. The carpenter has no feeling of hatred for others; he merely stands to profit by their death.”
Whatever the merit of Master Han’s view of human nature, his specific example turns out to be wrong. People haven’t stopped dying — the U.S. bids farewell to 3 million each year — but the “market for coffins” is fading nonetheless as America’s bereaved choose cremation over burial. And as casket-makers struggle to adapt to changing American funerary tastes, tariff strategists in the Trump administration’s Commerce Department are hurrying them toward oblivion. Some data, then an explanation –
Materials, purchases, and trade: Americans typically buy about a million coffins a year. The median price is around $2,500. About 60% are metal, most often welded 20-gauge carbon steel. Another 25% are wood, mostly oak or poplar. The other 15% use synthetic materials or biodegradable boxes. U.S.-based manufacturers make about two-thirds of these coffins, and the rest come from abroad, mainly from Mexico.
Cremation vs. burial: Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urn-Buriall,” the classic authority on eternity and the tomb, views earth and fire as equally suitable for the last act: “Man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.” As a matter of taste, though, Americans are steadily shifting away from the 20th century’s preference for coffin burials and toward cremation. The National Funeral Directors Association says cremation overtook burial in 2015, accounted for 63.4% of funeral services last year, and will reach 75% by 2035. One reason is cost — cremation is about $6,000 per service and burial is about $8,500, with the coffin price the main factor in the gap.
Looking ahead a decade or two, NFDA guesses that the shrinking number of burials will cut coffin sales to 500,000 a year. U.S. casket-makers are doing their best to respond; Indiana-based Batesville, for example, is broadening its offerings to full-service remembrance offerings such as urns and jewelry.
Now to policy:
The Trump administration has been publishing “national security” tariff decrees — technically “Section 232” tariff proclamations drafted by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security — for the past 15 months. One of the earliest, in February 2025, imposed tariffs of 25% on steel. Another, that June, raised this rate to 50%. By winter, according to the Department’s quarterly “Steel Executive Summary,” the average price of steel in the U.S. was $971 per ton — more than double the $460 worldwide average. They haven’t yet updated the Summary for spring, but last week’s “Producer Price Index” report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the cost of “materials for durable manufacturing”* up 13.7% this past year.
As metal prices rise, metal-using U.S. businesses naturally lose ground to foreigners making similar things. Thus, in August, the Department added a third “national security” metals decree declaring that large swathes of everyday goods are now considered “steel or aluminum derivative products,” also essential to national security and therefore subject to the same tariffs. This included everything from silverware and pitchforks to condensed milk, exercise equipment, shampoo, and coffins. The buyers — say, a bakery ordering whipped cream canisters, or a gym club buying a new balance beam — had to figure out the value of their purchase’s metal content and pay a 50% tariff on it.
Months of public derision and angry business complaints forced the Department to scrap this particular decree last month and try a new version. This drops some of last year’s loonier claims — the restaurants and gym clubs are off the hook, as are buyers of mosquito repellent, shampoo, and windshield-wiper fluid — and instead simply lists a lot of things made of metal and assigns them new tariff rates. Paint rollers, flashlight parts, clothes-hangers, that kind of thing. Coffins – “iron or steel caskets for burial,” with the 10-digit HTS line 7326.90.8677 — are in Annex I-B, with a 25% tariff.
How is all this working out? As an economic matter, setting aside the ludicrous claim that coffins are a “national security” product, Mr. Trump’s Commerce people are providing a lesson in unexamined premises, perverse incentives and unanticipated consequences. After 15 months of tariffs, Federal Reserve statisticians find coffin prices up about 4.5%. In practical terms, this means a median-tier coffin now costs about $100 more. Looking ahead, by raising the cost of both the materials and the final product, the administration is speeding up the trend toward cremation and, therefore, the decline of American casket-making. Meanwhile, we’re left with the unsettling image of tariff decrees literally chasing Americans into their graves.
And what might be done? Sir Thomas, recognizing that all human debates share a common fate, would likely counsel equanimity and acceptance. (“The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction.”) Alternatively, Congress could — whenever it wants — save bereaved families some money, and provide a bit of help to beleaguered casket-makers, by putting a stop to this.
* This includes not only metals but the lumber used in plain pine boxes, which now also gets “national security” tariffs of 10%.
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;
Assessing the U.S. coffin-market outlook, Funeral Directors Daily expects sales to fall to 507,000 per year in the next two decades.
And a concerned state of the industry report for 2025, noting among much else “off-again, on-again tariffs policies that decrease economic confidence” that will likely depress consumer spending and lead the bereaved to choose less costly services.
Broader funeral market analysis from death-care consultancy Foresight, including an examination of tariff impact on caskets and urns. Sample:
“Many funeral goods – caskets, urns, cremation machines – are imported or use imported components. These come with baked-in increases from trade policy. There’s less chaos than peak trade war years, but costs are still up.”
And from the business side, the largest U.S. casket-maker, Indiana-based Batesville, looks to adapt via e-commerce and full-service remembrance offerings.
Policy documents:
April 2026: The current Commerce Department “national security” decree imposes 25% tariff on coffins.
… or direct link to the product list; coffins in Annex 1-B.
August 2025: The now-defunct “steel or aluminum derivative products” Federal Register Notice declaring condensed milk, balance beams, etc. to be made of metal.
… PPI’s Gresser, in the Wall Street Journal last fall (subs. req.), has some strong words on this idea.
June 2025: Section 232 “national security” decree, still in effect, imposes 50% tariff on steel. Similar decrees put identical rates on copper and aluminum.
And last:
From Warring States-era China, Han Fei Tzu (250 B.C.E., Burton Watson translation) takes a dim view of human nature and favors very decisive government. See “Precautions Within the Palace” for the carriage-makers and carpenters; other highlights include “The Difficulties of Persuasion” and “The Five Vermin”.
Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn-Buriall (1658) has a melancholy subject but a brighter perspective on humanity. Last reassuring word:
“[M]an is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”
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.
On this week’s episode of The Learning Curve, co-hosts Alisha Searcy of the Center for Strong Public Schools and Mary Tamer of MassPotential speak with Rachel Canter, Director of Education Policy for the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools project and founder of Mississippi First, about Mississippi’s remarkable rise in K–12 student achievement and the policy reforms that helped drive it. Drawing on her experience as a former Teach For America teacher and longtime education advocate, Canter reflects on the leadership, accountability, and strategic reforms that helped Mississippi transform from one of the nation’s lowest-performing states to one of its fastest-improving on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. She discusses the science of reading, the debate between phonics and whole language instruction, and what schools must do to rebuild academic rigor in literacy, STEM, and civics. Canter also explores the importance of exposing students to great literature and roots music from William Faulkner and Delta bluesmen like Robert Johnson, drawing on Mississippi’s rich cultural legacy, and reflects on how lessons from Civil Rights era figures, including Emmett Till and Fannie Lou Hamer, can strengthen civics education today. She concludes by sharing policy recommendations for governors, legislators, educators, and parents seeking dramatic and lasting improvements in student outcomes nationwide.
Rachel Canter didn’t just report on the Mississippi Marathon—she was involved from the beginning of the state’s long journey toward educational improvement. In this episode, we discuss why meaningful change took so long and what it took to move reform from legislation into actual classroom practice.
This all comes after Democrats have tried to talk a big game about Ticketmaster, yet the monopoly’s state legislative efforts have largely gone under the radar.
“This is an enormous diversion away from the Live Nation – Ticketmaster monopoly,” says Diana Moss, the vice President and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute. “Don’t look over here at the monopoly, look over there at the resale market. Let’s call the resale market a bunch of scalpers, make unsubstantiated claims about how it functions, and lay the blame at the feet of the resale market.”
Many of those districts share something in common: a focus on literacy, instructional consistency, teacher coaching, accountability and human connection.
“The idea that there is some magical singular practice or policy or tool that, if we could just find it, would be like flipping a switch and then we could solve all the education problems is very seductive to people,” says Rachel Canter, director of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute and founder of Mississippi First, a nonprofit that helped push successful literacy reforms in that state. “But change always takes time.”
WASHINGTON (May 19, 2026) — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) released a new report today arguing that algorithmic pricing and innovation can expand consumer choice, lower prices, and reduce waste, but only if policymakers set smart guardrails rather than sweeping bans.
Yet several states are considering legislation that would sharply reduce the scope of data-driven pricing. Such restrictions risk pushing the economy backward, toward mass-produced goods designed for the median consumer, leaving low-income and rural households with fewer choices and higher costs.
“The real question for policymakers isn’t whether to allow data-driven pricing, but how to foster its benefits while preventing harm,” said Mandel. “Legislation like Maryland’s Protection from Predatory Pricing Act can protect consumers in essential markets like groceries while preserving tools that help budget-conscious shoppers save money.”
The report highlights how algorithmic innovation is already reshaping markets. Too Good To Go, a platform that uses algorithmic pricing to sell surplus restaurant food at discounts, has expanded to more than 20 countries. Public transit systems in San Francisco and Philadelphia are using algorithmic means-testing to automatically enroll low-income riders in discount transit programs. Telehealth and at-home testing are allowing consumers to access care on their own schedules.
Economic research cited in the report shows that access to increased product variety alone generates enormous welfare gains.
“With affordability top of mind for Americans today, we should be encouraging pro-consumer innovation, not restricting it,” said Mandel. “Moving away from the one-size-fits-all economy acknowledges that households have different tastes and needs.”
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 at @ppi.
Will Marshall, president and founder of the centrist-Democratic Progressive Policy Institute, argued that the only plausible path toward expanding the universe of Democratic voters “is to build a cross-class coalition that includes a lot more noncollege voters, who constitute a majority of the electorate. That entails changing the party’s self-marginalizing stances on economic redistribution, energy and climate and identity politics.”
Marshall cited an essay published last summer by a colleague, Richard Kahlenberg, director of Housing Policy and the American Identity Project at the institute, “Renewing the Democratic Party.”
After pointing to data on the public’s view of the Democratic Party similar to the poll findings I mentioned at the start of this essay, Kahlenberg argued: “Restoring the primacy of working-class priorities, on issues of culture as well as economics, provides the central path forward for a Democratic Party that wants to build a durable majority and restore its identity as the party of working people.”
But, he continued, as “racial gaps have narrowed in a variety of arenas, and class divides have mostly widened,” Democrats “have doubled down on framing challenges primarily in terms of racial and ethnic identity, rather than economic status.”
So why, Kahlenberg asked, “do Democrats engage in this self-defeating behavior? Two factors stand out.”
One is the shift in power of major Democratic interest groups from “organized labor, with its broad-based concerns about economic inequality,” to identity-based interest groups “for people of color, women and the L.G.B.T. community.”
The second “has been the rise of highly educated affluent white liberals, often referred to as ‘the Brahmin Left,’” who “are to the left of people of color on issues of race.”
Kahlenberg noted, “When issues are described in narrow racial terms, they are far less expensive to address and minimize the personal sacrifice required of upper-middle-class white liberals.”
To understand how data can increase variety and affordability while reducing waste, take a look at Too Good To Go, a company founded in Denmark in 2015 to allow consumers to purchase unsold food from restaurants and stores at significantly discounted prices. Since then, the company has expanded to more than 20 countries, including the U.S. and, most recently, Japan.
Users can purchase “surprise bags” for pickup at the end of the day, filled with varying selections of leftover goods that would have otherwise been thrown out. Too Good To Go sets surprise bag pricing based on time and previous sales data, helping businesses to further reduce waste by making sure more leftover food is sold. Meanwhile, buyers with the flexibility to place orders closer to pick up get lower prices, increasing affordability for budget-constrained consumers.
Companies like Too Good to Go show how variety, availability, and affordability can be expanded by algorithmic pricing, and its close cousin, algorithmic innovation — using data to create products and services that meet the real needs of consumers. More convenience and less waste are potential benefits of increased use of data.
Still, algorithmic pricing has encountered opposition because of fears that businesses will take advantage of consumers. Moreover, many people have the feeling that it’s unfair to charge different people different prices. “When New Yorkers place an order online or go to the grocery store, they should be able to trust that they are seeing the same prices as everyone else,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Conversely, excessively tight restrictions on algorithmic pricing and innovation would move us towards a “one-size-fits-all” economy, where everyone would pay the same price, and everyone would have access to the same limited selection of goods and services. Businesses would produce for the median consumer. People whose tastes are near the norm would do well, while people with different preferences and capabilities would feel like a square peg shoved into a round hole.
That balance suggests a need to set guardrails on acceptable practices, without going too far. One model is Maryland’s recently enacted Protection from Predatory Pricing Act, which provides the state’s consumers with thoughtful protections against exploitative practices while preserving the flexibility to use tools like promotional discounts, loyalty programs, and demand-responsive pricing that can help consumers access an expanded range of goods at lower prices.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) recently issued draft guidance clarifying its approach on flavored e-cigarettes. The guidance outlines a “graduated risk-proportionate evaluation” establishing a lower evidentiary burden to authorize tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes, a greater burden for menthol and mint-flavored products, and the greatest burden for sweet-flavored products. To date, the CTP has authorized 45 e-cigarette products in primarily tobacco and menthol flavors—and these are the only e-cigarettes legally sold in the United States.
At the same time, there is strong consumer demand for e-cigarettes not authorized by the FDA. Multiple organizations, including the FDA and the Truth Initiative, estimate that most e-cigarettes currently sold in the US are illegal products that lack FDA authorization, and there is growing concern across government, public health, and industry that an illicit market for unauthorized e-cigarettes is posing increased public health and public safety concerns. Much of the discussion to date has focused on the need for greater enforcement actions to address the illegal import, distribution, and sale of illegal e-cigarette products.
To be sure, law enforcement actions against the import and distribution of illegal products are necessary. But the US can and should avoid a drug war approach to e-cigarettes.
The pandemic may be over, but the K-12 education emergency it left behind has entered a new phase.
That’s the central message of the new Education Scorecardreport by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, and its partner organizations.
It’s more than an update to the story of pandemic learning loss, showing that America’s K-12 academic problem didn’t begin in March 2020 with COVID. The country entered a learning recession around 2013, when progress in reading and math achievement stalled and then declined.
It is not clear from the data presented that Yale is in fact discriminating on the basis of race, said Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. He advocates against racial preferences but favors preferences for lower-income students.
“Statistical disparities in academic qualifications between racial groups admitted [to the university] certainly raise red flags, but it is not definitive evidence of discrimination,” said Kahlenberg, who testified against Harvard’s policies in the court case challenging its admissions procedures. “We don’t know which of those two things are going on — economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal, or racial, which is not,” he said.
[…]
For the Trump administration, a race-neutral strategy like this is also illegal if the true goal is racial diversity. Officials refer to this as using another factor as a “proxy” for race.Still, the Supreme Court has never said that proxies are illegal and has declined opportunities to issue rulings that could have done so, Kahlenberg noted.
“The Supreme Court never said that seeking educational benefits of racial diversity is illegal,” he said. “To the contrary, they said the goal of increasing cross racial understanding is laudable.”
WASHINGTON (May 13, 2026) — Today, Paul Weinstein Jr., Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), issued the following statement ahead of the markup of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, also known as the CLARITY Act, by the Senate Banking Committee:
“Tomorrow, the Senate Banking Committee will begin marking up the CLARITY Act. The Committee has wanted to use the markup to clarify Section 4 of the GENIUS Act, which prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying yield like banks, but remains silent on stablecoin deposits on third-party platforms.
“But instead of closing the yield loophole, which will draw deposits away from regulated and insured banks and credit unions, the Committee is planning to consider a ‘compromise’ amendment that actually codifies the loophole into law.
“Senators Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) should be commended for their attempt to achieve a bipartisan compromise. But providing consumers with a less expensive payment processing tool does not require allowing stablecoins to offer customers yield-like rewards — and their proposed amendment should be strengthened to reflect that reality.”
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 at @PPI.
