Wednesday, October 21, 2020 

WHAT YOU MISSED

• Check out our two recent reports: A Place to Call Home: Improving Foster Care and Adoption Policy to Give More Children a Stable Family and Stable Monetary Policy to Connect More Americans to Work
• Last month, the JEC held a hearing on the economic impact of coronavirus. You can view our witnesses' testimonies and a recording of the hearing on our hearing page 
• The JEC updated the Reopen Readiness Tracker, an interactive web page that provides real-time state- and county-level data on COVID-19 cases and testing

CHART OF THE MONTH

Check out this chart from a recent blog post, which depicts reported private school closures throughout the United States in 2020. Fully two-thirds (73 out of 116) of the school closures in the wake of the pandemic were Catholic schools in the Northeast, with another fifteen in the South:

*Note: Grey is no closures reported. Source: CATO Institute COVID-19 tracker

A PLACE TO CALL HOME: IMPROVING FOSTER CARE AND ADOPTION POLICY TO GIVE MORE CHILDREN A STABLE FAMILY

The Joint Economic Committee released a new report about foster care and adoption policy written by Senior Policy Advisor Rachel Sheffield: 

“Unfortunately, the system designed to help children sometimes presents significant barriers to connecting children with those willing to provide loving homes.

…

Government and civil society should work together to help ensure that children in need find loving homes. This can be accomplished by increasing the pool of adoptive and foster parents, protecting faith-based adoption and foster care, providing qualifying foster children with permanent adoptive placements, and supporting infant adoption as a valid and loving option.”

STABLE MONETARY POLICY TO CONNECT MORE AMERICANS TO WORK

In our most recent report, Stable Monetary Policy to Connect More Americans to Work, Senior Economist Alan Cole argues that a well-chosen and consistent monetary policy can facilitate the execution of financial and business contracts and sustain the social contract by lowering uncertainty about the future:

"After the longest expansion on record, culminating in low unemployment rates not seen in half a century, the coronavirus pandemic plunged the United States overnight into a severe recession. While the ongoing downturn was clearly produced by an external shock unrelated to the state of the economy or economic policy, such recessions have, in recent decades, tended to be the exception rather than the rule. Just as more effective public health policies might have headed off the current recession, better economic policies might have averted many recessions in the past, including the Great Recession, and could prevent future recessions."

LATEST RESEARCH POSTS

Find our latest posts on economics, social capital, and the COVID-19 pandemic below:

• Cars, Kids, and Unintended Costs
  Policy analysts on both the left and right are increasingly giving attention to the implications of falling birth rates and considering policies to reverse them.

• Saving and COVID-19
  One unusual feature of the U.S. economy during the COVID-19 pandemic is a massive increase in saving. Saving nearly tripled over the first two quarters of 2020.

• High Social Capital Cities Not Immune to Homicide Spike?
  Our research suggests that cities with higher murder rates this year tend to have lower overall social capital scores.
   
• COVID-19, School Closures, and School Choice
  The pandemic need not have the final word; it can be an opportunity to ensure more parents have more opportunity to seek out an education that is not only high-quality, but one that is provided in the context they deem best for their individual needs.
   
• An Update on Charitable Giving
  The good news is that charitable giving last year rose overall, making 2019 giving the second highest to date in real terms (after 2017).

REOPEN READINESS TRACKER

Last summer, the Joint Economic Committee released a "Reopen Readiness Tracker" to provide policymakers and the public timely information to assess the extent to which public health conditions support economic activity. The tracker has been updated with new information, which can be viewed here. 

RECENT HEARINGS

Last month, the Joint Economic Committee held a hearing on America's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The witnesses who testified before the Committee were: Dr. Adam Michel, Senior Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation, Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer, Senior Fellow at Cato Institute, Dr. Austen D. Goolsbee, Robert P. Gwinn Professor at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Ashish K. Jha, Dean of Brown University School of Public Health. 

You can read JEC Chairman Mike Lee's opening statement here. Watch the full hearing and find more information on our hearing page. 

WHAT WE'RE READING

• How We Rise: How Social Networks in Charlotte Impact Economic Mobility; Richard Reeves, Camille Busette, Tonya Farrow-Chestnut, Kwadwo Frimpong, Hao Sun | Brookings

• Who Benefits from the Child Tax Credit?; Jacob Goldin, Katherine Michelmore | NBER

• Teen Well-being During Quarantine; W. Bradford Wilcox | American Enterprise Institute

• Women Are Deciding Not to Have Babies Because of the Pandemic. That's Bad for All of Us; Elaina Dockterman | TIME

• The Good and Bad News About Marriage in the Time of COVID-19; W. Bradford Wilcox, Lyman Stone | American Enterprise Institute