• The inflation rate hit a 30-year high in October 2021 at 6.2 percent.
  
• Labor shortages can also drive wages up, which in turn drives prices up.
• Inflation is a tax on all consumers, but not everyone is impacted the same way. Rising costs for goods such as food and gasoline disproportionately affect low-income, working poor, and elderly Americans.
  
• Rising prices reduce workers’ real wages and their purchasing power to obtain the goods and services they need. Inflation also devalues savings and wealth and erodes retirement dollars.

By: Hadley Heath Manning & Patrice Onwuka

• Universal care, not coverage, should be the goal of health policy. Sadly, a public option in health care will result in fewer high-quality private options for health insurance.
• Private health insurance and other private payment arrangements offer better access to a wider network of providers, thus offering more timely and better care.
  
• We should work toward offering more Americans these superior options, rather than an inferior public option. 

By: Hadley Heath Manning

• The most dramatic increase in murders began after the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Cities across America went through the same cycle: Rioting and anti-cop agitation precipitated a police pullback, which precipitated a sharp uptick in homicides and shootings.
  
• We have witnessed a more intense and far-reaching version of what happened in many U.S. cities after the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., or what happened in Baltimore after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray: a reduction in proactive policing, followed by an explosion of violence.

By: Rachel DiCarlo Currie

• President Biden can boast that he ended U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan, but he did so at immense human cost to Afghans who had placed their trust in America.
  
• Biden talks a lot about rallying America’s democratic allies, but he failed to consult with allied forces who still had some 7,500 of their own service members in the country — forcing a scramble to get them out.
  
• Biden’s helter-skelter withdrawal turned into a degradation of America’s global standing, in effect a surrender.

By: Claudia Rosett

• Public school enrollment decreased by 3% during the last school year. Homeschooling rates doubled to over 11% of the total school-aged population. Families in areas with perpetually closed public schools, but fully open private schools, eagerly transferred their children.
• State legislators recognized the soaring demand for educational options, and expanded or created new school choice programs in 20 states in 2021.
• School choice policies empower parents, rather than school board officials or district bureaucrats, to direct their children’s education.

By: Ginny Gentles