Today, Joshua Rauh testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee on the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the economic reforms Congress should pursue from here; Marianna Kudlyak and coauthors share findings from their study of minimum wage increases and posted job vacancies; and Peter Berkowitz pushes back against arguments that American higher education does not need substantial reforms to restore traditional liberal education.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In testimony presented at a field hearing of the House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Senior Fellow Joshua D. Rauh advanced four key points: “Economic growth is essential to creating opportunities for American families. Sustained economic growth requires a tax code that rewards work, savings, and investment. Key tax provisions in [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act] will strengthen incentives to work, save, and invest,” and “Additional growth-focused policies are needed to ensure economic dynamism.” Looking to items Congress has not yet acted on, Rauh argued that “a key priority for lawmakers should be to reduce the regulations that stifle productivity, entrepreneurship, and innovation,” including “cumbersome permitting rules, incumbent-protecting licensing requirements, and rigid labor regulations that raise the cost of hiring.” Rauh concluded by calling on lawmakers to recognize their shared responsibility to “pursue policies that improve incentives and rein in borrowing to preserve prosperity for future generations.” Read more here.
A new paper from Marianna Kudlyak and coauthors Murat Tasci and Didem Tüzemen uses a unique data set and methods to examine the effects of minimum wage increases on posted job vacancies. The study focused on posted vacancies in “occupations with a larger share of workers earning close to the effective minimum wage.” The authors estimate that “a 10 percent increase in the state-level effective minimum wage reduces vacancies in these occupations relative to the rest by 2.4 percent in the same quarter, and the cumulative effect is as large as 4.5 percent a year later.” The authors note that their focus on vacancies allowed them “to highlight changes in firms’ hiring intentions in response to minimum wage increases.” The study shows that vacancy reducing effects of minimum wage increases—driven by employers retracting or not posting job listings—start three quarters prior to their implementation. Read more here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
Writing at RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz examines the ongoing issue of ideological imbalance in American higher education, particularly among professors. To conservatives, Berkowitz writes, “enhancing viewpoint diversity was about more than fairness,” as the presentation of varied points of view is an integral part of liberal education traditionally understood. Berkowitz maintains that in a healthier political climate, “universities would hire with a view not to political convictions but rather to subject-matter expertise.” Today, however, he suggests that “some attention to political sensibility is necessary to correct the all but monolithic progressive edifice that faculty and administration have built over many decades.” Still, the former law professor argues that “no compromise should be made on intellectual excellence” when hiring conservatives. Academia simply must reject “the self-serving equation of intellectual excellence with the affirmation of progressive opinions.” Read more here.
Revitalizing History
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute announced today that Stanford University historian and Hoover Institution Research Fellow Jennifer Burns has been awarded the 2025 Age of Reagan Conference Book Prize for her critically acclaimed biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. The prize honors outstanding scholarship that deepens understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the broader “Age of Reagan” in modern US history. Announcing the prize, the foundation and institute commended Burns for illuminating how Friedman’s ideas—on inflation, limited government, and economic freedom—resonate with Reagan-era conservatism while shaping today’s dialogues on markets and liberty. Burns will deliver remarks during this week’s Age of Reagan Conference, July 30–August 1, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Read more here.
Torigian’s The Party’s Interests Come First Featured in The Liberal Patriot and ChinaTalk
Research Fellow Joseph Torigian’s recently published biography of Xi Zhongxun, father of Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping, continues to receive critical acclaim across a variety of publications. The editors of the popular Substack The Liberal Patriot write that Torigian’s biography “tells us so much about not just Xi Jinping’s father—an incredible character in his own right—but also the history and development of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] and state in the 20th century and, of course, Xi himself.” At ChinaTalk, another popular Substack, Jordan Schneider and Phoebe Chow write that Torigian’s book “is a monumental scholarly achievement—easily a contender for one of the best China books of the decade.” Torigian joined ChinaTalk for an interview on the book, where he discussed the purpose of his biography; his methodology for uncovering hidden party history; what the life of Xi Zhongxun reveals about the CCP and its current head, Xi Jinping; and the role of suffering in paradoxically strengthening loyalty to the party. Read more here and here.
Related Commentary