The Heritage Foundation

Solutions

The Heritage Foundation

Solutions

Welcome to The Heritage Foundation’s guide to the best solutions to America’s biggest issues. Here you will find easy-to-understand solutions to address issues such as improving health care choices and lowering costs, addressing climate change, reforming welfare, creating jobs, increasing individual liberty, and so much more.

This site provides a plain-language summary of each issue, solutions our elected leaders should act on, and facts and figures to support each recommendation. It also provides key points that you can use when talking to others.

Scroll down or click on any issue area on the left-hand menu to get started!

Pandemic Response

On March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic, and two days later the United States entered a state of emergency. The disease has wreaked havoc on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans who have dramatically changed their behavior and businesses in response. States have reinforced these changes with stay-at-home orders and mandatory closures of “non-essential” businesses. Millions of American workers are now jobless.

Policy Proposals
  1. States and local governments should use stay-at-home orders sparingly and only where necessary.
  2. Congress should expand liability protections with a safe harbor for businesses and workers that follow guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in good faith.
  3. Review all federal regulations that have been waived or modified in response to COVID-19 and consider permanent changes.
Quick Facts
  1. After millions of job losses in April, the U.S. unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent by May. However, more than 20 million Americans remain unemployed, and the number of “permanent” job losses continued to rise, increasing by 295,000 in May to 2.3 million.
  2. Roughly 1.4 million health care jobs were lost in April, reflecting a 9 percent drop across the industry. Health care spending fell by almost 20 percent on an annualized basis between the months of January through March as routine but still important care was stopped.
Saving Lives and Livelihoods
  • Good public health policy is good economic policy. The response to the pandemic should be guided by one key principle: protecting both lives and livelihoods.
  • Essential to any response is a strong commitment to the Constitution and to the American values of individual liberty and free enterprise that have made this country great and guided it through many severe challenges.
  • Policymakers, the private sector, and civil society must navigate a return to work while making strategic adjustments to slow the spread of the virus.

To help guide local, state, and federal policymakers, the private sector, and communities through crisis and into recovery, The Heritage Foundation assembled the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission. The mission is clear: Develop recommendations to protect both lives and livelihoods. Essential to any response is a strong commitment to the Constitution and to the American values of individual liberty and free enterprise that have made this country great and guided it through many severe challenges. America is strengthened by its states, which, as laboratories of democracy, allow decisions to be made closest to and reflective of the needs of the people. The states, in turn, are critically aided by Congress and the executive branch, which provide reliable information, regulatory relief, coordination, and targeted and temporary funding. This governing system of unity and diversity has enabled a flexible response to a virus with widely divergent effects in communities across the country and within states.

Building on that solid ground, policymakers, the private sector, and civil society must navigate a return to work while making strategic adjustments to slow the spread of the virus. Indeed, good public health policy is good economic policy: lives and livelihoods.

A sound public health strategy not only helps to reduce illness and mortality associated with the disease, but also helps to mitigate the long-term economic effects. Health policy should thus focus on constraining the spread of the infection, treating and quarantining the sick, and protecting the most vulnerable—not on shutting down American life. Indiscriminate “lockdowns” are blunt tools that neither qualify as intrinsically good public health policy, nor adequately reflect the varied virus exposure within states and regions. Rather, states and localities should employ more far more measured, data-driven approaches. At the same time, policymakers should expand Americans’ access to healthcare and reduce regulatory barriers that inhibit innovation in research and development of disinfectants, therapeutics, and vaccines needed to help fight the virus.

Economic policy should focus on empowering Americans and businesses to safely return to work. Work and workplaces are central to American life, not just for the sake of the economy but also for the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Temporary and targeted aid is useful. But the government cannot spend its way into national prosperity: Americans need paychecks more than they need stimulus checks. Therefore, durable policy change will send a stronger signal of the stability and confidence American businesses and workers need to innovate and adapt to a new normal. Regulatory reform has been essential to crisis response, opening up critical resources and enabling people to solve problems expeditiously across the economy, civil society, and public health sectors. It will indispensable to a confident recovery.

Similarly, by strengthening economic freedom among America’s allies and partners, the U.S. can lead a global recovery. Throughout history, there has been no better model than that of free enterprise for how to lift people out of poverty and into better, healthier standards of living. Now is the time to double down on that commitment. Countless American jobs involve the exchange of materials with our allies and trading partners around the world; those jobs also depend upon the skills and talents of people on both sides. The virus also has posed global challenges, and solutions will similarly come through the synergy of a network response. Reopening supply chains and removing barriers to free trade will reinvigorate economic activity and improve access to innovative life-saving technology to fight the virus. At the same time, the experience of the pandemic has highlighted areas in which the U.S. is too reliant on foreign sources and manufacturing for critical supplies, and underscores the need to verify information and data coming from authoritarian regimes that lack accountability.

Looking ahead to the future, it is critical that when the next pandemic comes, we are not simply responding to the previous one, or ignoring the investments already made toward preparedness. Even now, governments at all levels should review funding priorities and amend their regulatory environments to be more flexible in crises. Businesses must learn now how to adapt quickly for the future. And civil society must be strengthened so that Americans have thriving communities to which they can turn when they need support. Where structural change is needed to our safety nets, health care systems, and financial systems, we should evaluate the needs and pursue appropriate reforms now.

While each branch and level of government is playing an important role in responding to the current pandemic, no other sector of society has been as essential or successful as have everyday Americans and businesses, who have rallied in creative ways to help one another and meet the needs that the government cannot. The best and the brightest have stepped forward during this pandemic to work on the most challenging problems of the day. This experience also has demonstrated exactly how important free markets and ideas are to overcoming crises; free markets and ideas unleash the incredible ingenuity of the private sector and civil society. Recovery will be driven by American innovators, entrepreneurs, businesses, and consumers. They are the key to recovery and hope for whatever the future holds.

The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission has offered 265 recommendations for an “all of society” approach that engages state and local governments, Congress, the Administration, businesses, schools, community organizations, churches, and civil society as they navigate the current crisis and prepare for the next. The recommendations cover a wide swath of issues ranging from healthcare access, education, protections for the vulnerable and disabled individuals, and improvements to the Paycheck Protection Program to international trade and travel, barriers to innovation and research, 5G infrastructure, tax policy, and small business capital formation, among many others. Together, these recommendations inform a balanced strategy to save both lives and livelihoods.

Key among these are recommendations that would quickly reinvigorate economic activity while making smart accommodations for vulnerable individuals and communities.

States and local governments should allow businesses in counties with low incidence of COVID-19 to reopen. Just five states—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California—accounted for 50 percent of all of the confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and 57 percent of all related deaths by May 2020. Most counties (80 percent) have had fewer than five deaths related to the new coronavirus.

States and local governments should use stay-at-home orders sparingly and only where necessary. Better, more targeted approaches should focus on infection hot spots, isolate the sick from the workplace, and protect the more vulnerable (those who are elderly, in nursing homes, or have preexisting conditions).

The White House should establish a national portal with accessible data on the spread of the coronavirus as well as the modeling used to support decisions made by governments at all levels. Access to information is absolutely critical for governments, medical professionals, businesses, and individuals to make the best decisions on how best to respond. Specifically, the availability of this information would reinforce consistency in standards that can be carried out locally, helping physicians. More access to information also would help to eliminate uncertainty about the virus that hurts the confidence of businesses and consumers.

States and local governments should immediately allow all medical offices to reopen. Many states shut down health care services considered “nonessential” to prepare for projected massive surges in patients infected by the coronavirus. This government-created impediment has hindered the ability of medical professionals to meet Americans’ ongoing health care needs, and many medical workers are being unnecessarily furloughed. Amid an unprecedented health crisis, over one million health care workers face unemployment.

All federal departments and independent agencies should review all regulations that have been waived or modified in response to COVID-19 and consider permanent changes. Such a clear statement by the President to executive agencies would provide more long-term confidence and stability for businesses by ensuring regulatory regimes work in good times and bad, facilitate innovation and market advancement, and still protect health and safety.

State and local governments should make decisions based on data for the local district, and even the specific school, not the entire state. Further, states should help families return to work, and students to maintain education continuity by lifting barriers to online education and making education funding student-centered and portable.

The federal government should partner with churches, grassroots organizations, NGOs, and state and local governments to increase wellness education, including education on nutrition, fitness, and risk avoidance, among minority communities. This is necessary because of the disproportionate effect of this virus in minority communities. Regardless of their race or color, Americans must be vigilant in adhering to mitigation efforts if they must leave their homes each day to go to work. If minority communities are not participating in recommended risk avoidance, they risk a slower return to normal. Further, the President should task federal health agencies, as they build scientific understanding of COVID-19, with investigating the underlying causes of the virus’s disparate impact on minority and other communities.

Congress should expand liability protections with a safe harbor for businesses and workers that follow guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in good faith. A safe harbor by Congress would provide much-needed confidence and stability that would encourage business owners to reopen.

Congress should liberalize future Paycheck Protection Program loans to broaden eligible expenditures, extend the relevant period, and limit the loans to businesses that were hit hard. Businesses that were forced to shut down must rehire and retrain employees, secure inventory, reestablish vendor relationships, and settle balances. Congress should broaden what can be paid for and forgiven with new Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans for businesses that suffered a substantial decline in gross revenues because of the coronavirus.

Congress should reduce small-business tax liability with a “physical presence” standard. Every small business that sells online, no matter where it is physically located, is subject to the more than 10,000 different taxing jurisdictions around the country—each with its own tax rates and rules. This burdensome, complex requirement threatens to bankrupt many small retailers and prohibit others from retooling to ship new products. Congress should protect vulnerable retailers by codifying a physical presence test for tax collection.

Congress and the Administration should coordinate legislative and regulatory changes to expand access to capital for small businesses. Entrepreneurs will drive recovery by reopening existing businesses and taking on new risks to meet new needs in the post-crisis world. Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission should remove barriers for small businesses to access peer-to-peer lending, credit unions, and investment finders. By simplifying exemptions and disclosure frameworks, and working to simplify regulations, small public companies will find it easier to recover and grow.

Congress should incentivize research and development and infrastructure investments with permanent full expensing. Starting in 2022, research and development expenses and new spending on machinery and tools no longer will be fully deductible, which will discourage innovation and investment. Research and development spending is critical as the private sector develops new remedies and reorganizes to meet the needs of a post-coronavirus recovery.

America’s thought leaders (economists, academics, authors, and journalists) should investigate and communicate how freedom has shaped America’s response to the coronavirus and its economic effects in contrast to responses by authoritarian regimes such as China. America’s freedom of speech and press, freedom of association, freedom of conscience and religion, and right to free assembly have enabled civil society to participate in disseminating information about the virus and to provide medical, material, and social assistance to citizens in ways that government cannot. In addition, our freedoms have enabled citizens to hold federal, state, and local government accountable. These positive externalities of civil rights, in addition to economic freedom, should be included in messaging about America’s leadership of the free world’s economic recovery.

The Administration should eliminate all tariffs imposed since 2018. Trade freedom is vital to economic recovery and to building certainty in supply chains. Countless U.S. jobs depend on materials from Great Britain, the European Union, and around the world—and vice versa. The Trump Administration should remove Section 201, Section 232, and Section 301 tariffs to benefit all parties.

Fact: COVID-19 is the latest in a series of highly infectious viruses that have appeared over the course of modern history.

  • Ebola, measles, poliomyelitis (polio), yellow fever, and smallpox are all dangerous viruses, and smallpox alone killed approximately 300 million people in the 20th century. The 1918–1919 influenza (flu) pandemic resulted in an estimated 500 million people worldwide infected and approximately 50 million people killed, with 675,000 of those deaths occurring in the U.S. Three additional flu pandemics occurred during the 20th and 21st centuries (in 1957, 1968, and 2009).

Fact: Although all states have reported cases of COVID-19, the distribution of cases and deaths has remained heavily concentrated in a small number of states and counties.

  • As of May 11, just 10 states accounted for nearly 70 percent of all U.S. cases and 75 percent of all deaths (higher than their 52 percent share of the U.S. population). Fifty percent of all U.S. counties (with a 10 percent share of the U.S. population) had zero COVID-19 deaths, and 63 percent (representing 15 percent of the population) had no more than one.

Fact: National and global economic activity have been hit hard by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

  • After millions of job losses in April, the U.S. unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent by May. However, more than 20 million Americans remain unemployed, and the number of “permanent” job losses continued to rise, increasing by 295,000 in May to 2.3 million.
  • In its April 2020 World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund warned that economic activity worldwide is expected to contract 3 percent—the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The gross domestic product of the three USMCA countries is greater than that of all 27 nations in the European Union combined. However, their economies are projected to contract by –5.9 percent (U.S.), –6.2 percent (Canada), and –6.6 percent (Mexico) by the end of 2020.

Fact: Indiscriminate shutdown orders are extremely costly and have blocked access to important ongoing healthcare for Americans.

  • Roughly 1.4 million health care jobs were lost in April, reflecting a 9 percent drop across the industry. Healthcare spending fell by almost 20 percent on an annualized basis between the months of January through March as routine but still important care was stopped.
  • Lockdown orders lasting eight weeks could cost Americans $2 trillion in lost output, lost employment, and the cost to taxpayers of unemployment benefits all of which reflect the extent to which Americans are no longer able to live their lives. This does not take into account further social and public health costs.