This month’s roller-coaster ride through the markets has been more frightening than exhilarating for many Americans, who have more than $44 trillion invested in retirement accounts.

The share of US workers represented by a union ended 2024 at 9.9%. Strip out public sector workers and the rate was 5.9%.

America’s housing crisis is often portrayed as a matter of supply. Depending on whom you ask, the shortfall is anywhere from 1.5 million to 7 million homes. Much of the policy debate focuses on how to close that gap.

For more than two decades, America has pursued a policy as costly as the New Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s, but with a much narrower aim: cut taxes.

The US federal budget seems out of control. Funding spats and debt-ceiling standoffs routinely threaten to force defaults and shutdowns. America's once-unassailable credit rating keeps slipping. Has the government simply become too big to manage?

A comfortable retirement is supposed to be the culmination of the American dream, yet far too many actual Americans are falling short of achieving it. In the spirit of fan fiction, I'd like to set up a better ending.

Let’s assume the US economy has achieved a rare soft landing, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently declared. The pandemic-driven disruption is over, jobs recovered, inflation contained.

Experts have been puzzling over a seeming disconnect in America: By most measures the economy is doing well, but it's not giving people much satisfaction or confidence. Could it, they wonder, have something to do with social media, or the human propensity to share bad news first?

So, here’s an idea: Dedicate the revenue collected from the estate tax into a trust fund that finances early childhood education, spanning childcare to preschool.