The PolicyMatters Editorial team is happy to announce the publication of the Autumn 2006 Issue. In our Features section this issue, Sonya Blesser examines health savings accounts to see if their professed merits hold up under scrutiny. Renowned feminist economist Marianne A. Ferber and University of Illinois economics professor Michael Brun collaborate to analyze whether the policy choices of female legislators differ from those of their male counterparts. Matthew Steinberg asserts that privately-operated supplemental educational services, which have expanded extensively under No Child Left Behind, are not worth what they cost. Finally, Adam Langton, Hai Guan, and Anne Su assess...

Doing some research for a professor here on the minimum wage, I ran across this graph of the inflation-adjusted value of the U.S. minimum wage (which is a fairly common sight nowadays) plus the effective hourly bonus from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) added on. This was the first time I had ever seen such a statistic. Since the the organization presenting the chart, the Employment Policies Institute, is hardly non-partisan, I took the numbers with a grain of salt (case in point: they use the value of the EITC for an earner with two or more kids, which...