• Unbanked and underbanked Americans are left vulnerable amid record inflation and financial regulatory policies that restrict access to non-traditional banking services.
• While most Americans use banks for their monetary needs, the Financial Deposit Insurance Corporation estimated that 5.4 percent of U.S. households (about 7.1 million) were unbanked in 2019.
• Non-Asian minorities, low-income households, less-educated households, young households, and households with disabled members are more likely than others to be  unbanked, according to the FDIC. Barriers to accessing other financial resources impact these groups the most.

By: Carrie Sheffield

• Covid-era education policies compounded an already dire literacy crisis. Students entered the pandemic with weak academic skills, with only one-third of students reading proficiently and less than one-quarter of 12th graders proficient in math in 2019.
• According to a McKinsey study, students didn’t just miss out on academic knowledge: “They are at risk of finishing school without the skills, behaviors, and mindsets to succeed in college or in the workforce.”
• Children are Covid’s lowest-risk demographic, but K-12 students have suffered the most throughout the pandemic at the hands of negligent school district officials and powerful teachers unions.
  

By: Ginny Gentles

• The most American form of environmentalism is conservation, typically defined by public-private partnerships, deregulation, and market solutions to environmental problems.
• Conservation calls for wise use of natural resources while advancing policies that equally bolster nature and people.
• While the federal government is impeding environmental progress, conservation is succeeding at the state and local levels due to public-private partnerships and market solutions.

By: Gabriella Hoffman

• Equal Pay Day purportedly represents widespread sexism and discrimination against women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the raw wage gap by comparing the median salary for all male and female full-time wage and salary workers.
• In 2020, they found that female workers earned 82 percent compared to male workers. In other words, women earn 82 cents to each dollar that men earn.
• This argument overlooks the many factors that contribute to the wage gap such as seniority, education, hours, and working conditions.

By: Hadley Heath Manning & Charlotte Whelan

• Biden could free the U.S. energy industry he is now strangling, thus helping the U.S. economy, while downgrading Putin’s leverage as czar of the world’s biggest gas station.
  
• Biden could begin urgently building up a U.S. military focused on deterring and winning wars, rather than social issues and eco-fuels.
  
• America has experience standing up to the Kremlin. As we head into a new Cold War—or not so cold—it is time to revisit how America won the last one.

By: Claudia Rosett