AEI - American Enterprise Institute

In anticipation of the annual release of new Census Bureau income and poverty estimates on September 15, this event provides an opportunity to assess long-running trends in hardship, inequality, and economic mobility. Recent analyses—often drawing less attention than the research they overturn or temper—have shown that declines in poverty have been much larger than most people realize, while increases in income concentration and declines in absolute mobility have been much smaller.

By Tao Tan June 24, 2026 The debate about private money in higher education is loud, emotion-laden, and not typically backed by sufficient evidence. Up to this point, access to the evidence has been challenging, since it sits in millions of separate tax filings that few people have read and even fewer have systematically analyzed.

AEI’s SOURCE (Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures) provides visibility into over 1 million grants from over 57,000 U.S. private foundations to nearly 5,300 colleges and universities. AEI SOURCE is developed by Tao Tan. SOURCE (Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures) is an interactive tool to access a dataset of over 1 million grants from over 57,000 U.S. private foundations to colleges and universities, predominantly American.

Skip to main content Advancing the American Dream Read Now Meet the Editors Kevin Corinth is a senior fellow, the Daniel C. Searle Chair, and the deputy director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches economic mobility, poverty, safety-net programs, homelessness, social capital, and other issues.

One word summarizes the federal government’s policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to safety-net programs: more. More programs, more benefits, millions more recipients—and ultimately far more costs for taxpayers to bear.

The American Dream is celebrated as a core tenet of our society, promising opportunity and a better life through hard work and determination. Yet for many Americans, their pursuit of that dream has become harder, not for lack of effort but through the persistent rise of the cost of living. A higher cost of living directly increases the difficulty of achieving a higher standard of living, requiring a higher income to afford the same bundle of goods and services.

Today the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is releasing Opportunity Book, a new online tool that connects policymakers, journalists, and researchers with innovative federal policy ideas. Opportunity Book is a publicly available database that launches with 38 individual policies related to opportunity from 13 AEI scholars.

Parents are often most economically vulnerable when their children are young and dependent on outside childcare or in need of a stay-at-home parent. The decision to have a child is a difficult one, and it comes with high costs. In light of decreasing birth rates, high costs that new parents face are a major problem. We propose giving parents the option to pull up to $30,000 of future child tax credit (CTC) funds forward into as few as two years.

Matt Weidinger’s December 2025 commentary argued persuasively that complexity has become an impediment to rational reform of the nation’s safety net. By approving scores of new programs across several decades, Congress and the states have assembled such an unwieldy and uncoordinated anti-poverty portfolio that policymakers have difficulty fully grasping what it contains much less what might happen if they attempted to reform even one or two components of it.