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State’s special needs students need school choice

Shannon Mitchell will never forget the first words from her nonverbal eight-year-old daughter, Brianna. “Hi, mama,” Briana said after getting off the bus on her first day at her new school. “I love you.” Before this precious moment, Brianna languished at her Philadelphia district school for several years. Brianna — who was diagnosed with autism when she was 2 years old — needed extra support and resources, such as speech therapy. But her school couldn’t provide these much-needed services. Instead, her teacher often resorted to sending her to the back of the classroom to ...

The quiet engine behind youth’s malaise

For years, pointing out the obvious was considered impolite: America’s biggest, most distortionary transfer of wealth does not flow from elites to the working class. Nor does it show up as corporate welfare. It flows from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. It’s the defining injustice of our fiscal regime, the largest driver of our government debt and the quiet engine behind the malaise of Millennials and Gen Z. More than a decade ago, Nick Gillespie and I wrote a piece in Reason arguing that Social Security and Medicare had together become the great ...

Community and cooperation during the holidays

There is a clear truth about our politics and our broader society today: It feels more divided than at any point in recent memory. Scroll through social media or turn on the television, and we see disagreement hardened into distrust. Differences of opinion have become reasons, at their worst, to hurt one another, and in everyday life, to walk away in anger and resentment rather than work together. For many Pennsylvanians, that division isn’t abstract; it shows up at kitchen tables, school board meetings, and community events where conversations once felt easier. The holiday season, ...

Energy future shouldn’t be held hostage to myths

In a December 6th commentary, Gordon Tomb, a senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation, argued Pennsylvania must weaken environmental and energy regulations to attract data centers. It’s a familiar but flawed premise: that regulation is inherently anti-growth and that renewable energy requirements undermine reliability and competitiveness. It misrepresents both the realities of modern data-center development, and the economic and energy challenges Pennsylvania actually faces. Tomb treats data centers as uniquely vulnerable to oversight, as if they will flee at the first sign of ...

Future of energy policy begins in Pennsylvania

As states grapple with rising electricity prices, lawmakers struggle to strike a balance between affordable energy and responsible environmental stewardship. Achieving both may seem impossible, but Pennsylvania proves otherwise. Over the last decade, the Keystone State has aptly demonstrated that states do not need to sacrifice energy development in favor of heavy-handed Green New Deal-style restrictions. Pennsylvania lawmakers arrived at this conclusion on the heels of a four-month budget impasse. The monthslong stalemate ended when Gov. Josh Shapiro and the General Assembly agreed ...

‘Obamacare’ a prescription for fraud

Remember when Americans were told that the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) would lower health care costs and that if you liked your doctor, you could keep her? How things have changed over the past 15 years. Health care costs continue to rise faster than inflation and millions of Americans have discovered that their health insurance plans don’t cover their chosen physician. As the saying goes, to add insult to injury, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a severe indictment of the federal Obamacare insurance exchanges that revealed troubling ...