Eric Cochling in the DC Journal

Originally published February 3, 2026

A full agenda is underway in the 35 states that have just convened their legislative sessions. Affordability is the buzzword heard far and wide, as millions of Americans continue to struggle with the high cost of living. Economic concerns are likely to dominate statehouses in 2026, especially in an election year, with 36 states holding gubernatorial races. The issues debated in the legislative halls will almost certainly spill onto the campaign trails.

Even without the election-year backdrop, state lawmakers will feel pressure from their constituents to do something about rising household costs. Beyond the cost of groceries and lingering inflation, nothing has quite captured the cost-of-living spotlight like the skyrocketing price of housing.

Home ownership, once a staple of the American Dream, is out of reach for many, but especially the poor and younger generations. The average first-time homebuyer is now 40, a striking shift from the 1980s and 1990s, when Americans usually bought their first home in their late 20s or early 30s.

Owning a home is the key to moving up the economic ladder and building wealth, but it also plays an important role in helping people build families and communities. When Americans no longer see homeownership as part of their future, they delay starting families and putting down roots.

Many state and local governments recognize the magnitude of this problem — and, thankfully, have a great deal of control over housing policy through zoning, permitting and land-use rules. State leaders can look to Montana as an example; it recently passed housing reforms that are set to expand supply and reduce prices.

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Eric Cochling is chief program officer and general counsel at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

Josh Crawford in The Hill

Originally published January 20, 2026

With 2025 behind us, violent crime — especially murder — is likely down nationally once again. Although it will be months before we have official statistics, early indicators suggest a continuation of the trend that began in mid-2022 and has resulted in tens of thousands of fewer crime victims.

Americans are taking notice. For the second year in a row, respondents are reporting crime as a less serious problem. Less than half of Americans think crime is now rising.

All of this should be welcome news. And like most policy successes, where you sit politically likely informs what you believe about why it happened. Also like most policy achievements, there is disagreement at this point exactly what has contributed to the decline.

Yes, the Biden administration did spend hundreds of millions of dollars on “community violence intervention” programs. Police departments spent much more than that recruiting new officers. States passed laws strengthening sentences for violent offenders. Voters in big cities also began to reject progressive prosecutors, and police departments all over began to implement best practices focused on violent groups and repeat offenders.

What no one is claiming, however, is that the recent decline in murder and violence is the result of dramatic improvements in poverty, education, inequality, racial prejudice or any other so-called “root cause” of crime.

For the uninitiated, “root causes” refers to the set of social conditions that many far-left politicians, progressive activists, and sociology and criminology professors argue are the true drivers of criminal behavior. These argue that reducing crime would first require addressing issues such as poverty, inequality, and housing. They consider policing, prosecution, punishment, and incapacitation as stop-gap measures at best. Some will even argue that these actually contribute to crime by worsening social and economic problems.

By focusing on underlying social conditions rather than individual decision-making and free will, progressives try to divert focus away from individual accountability toward society more broadly. But as crime has dropped in recent years, the social conditions said to produce crime have been unchanged or gotten worse.

On the economic front — and contrary to popular belief — inequality has remained largely unchanged in recent years. A broader measure of poverty that accounts for government benefits and taxes shows that poverty has increased in recent years among working-age adults and children. (The rate is down for seniors, but that isn’t a group frequently committing violent or serious crime.)

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Joshua Crawford is a public safety fellow with the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

Buzz Brockway in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Originally published November 25, 2025

In their pitch to voters, the 2026 candidates for Georgia governor have mentioned they are likely to address tax reform, health care, jobs, immigration, child care and housing issues.

But none have mentioned a priority that is not only connected to those issues but has a significant impact on the well-being of millions of Georgia families — welfare reform. And with new federal work requirements set to take effect, policymakers will no longer be able to overlook Georgia’s public assistance programs.

With more than 1 million Georgians struggling to make ends meet, reforms to the safety net should be a top priority for Georgia’s next leader.

These low-income residents turn to Georgia’s safety net programs for help, including Medicaid for health insurance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for food support and Section 8 for housing assistance.

Both Republicans and Democrats agree these programs are a critical support system for disadvantaged communities.

But disagreement tends to emerge over whether welfare truly serves these people — helping them move from reliance on public assistance to independence and a more fulfilling life.

On that measure, welfare is failing — and its shortfall should capture the attention of Georgia’s next governor.

Not only does Georgia’s welfare system — like nearly all states’ — fail at its stated goal of moving people out of poverty, but it also compels recipients to stay dependent, keeping them in a cycle of poverty that so often defines generations of low-income Americans.

Welfare discourages recipients from getting married before having children and from working — troubling given those factors align with two of the three indicators in the Success Sequence, a series of life milestones that research has shown are the keys to happier lives, stable families and upward mobility (the other factor is obtaining a high school degree).

Georgia’s next governor would do well to recognize that the implications of this flawed system extend beyond just welfare recipients. It has a significant impact on the state’s budget and economy.

Social safety net programs, particularly Medicaid, are often the biggest expenses in a state’s budget. While the federal government partially funds welfare programs, the states are responsible for a significant share of the costs and are responsible for managing the system. With these high costs, policymakers should assess whether the billions spent on welfare is moving people out of poverty or keeping them on the economic sidelines.

And then there’s the direct impact on Georgia’s workforce. Georgia’s labor force participation rate, or the number of working-age people employed or looking for a job, is 60.6%. Or put another way, nearly 40% of Georgians, many of them prime-age men, who can work are choosing not to.

A low labor force participation rate is a warning sign for the state’s economic health. Every nondisabled Georgian who opts out of work isn’t just losing income — our state loses tax revenue, businesses lose workers and communities lose engaged citizens who are the foundation of thriving neighborhoods.

Georgia’s next governor should ask, then, why the state’s welfare programs fail to connect beneficiaries to resources they need to help them find a stable job. Unemployment is one of the primary reasons individuals seek assistance in the first place.

And yet when someone in Georgia turns to the welfare system for support, they are not connected to work. Workforce development programs exist, but they oddly operate separately than the social safety net.

Fortunately, policymakers in Georgia have a road map to turn to called “One Door to Work,” which integrates workforce development with welfare. Under this policy, people who access the safety net for help are connected to one caseworker who not only helps them meet their immediate needs but connects them with resources to find a job. Utah passed this reform in the 1990s and now boasts the lowest numbers of people on Medicaid and food stamps — along with consistently low unemployment rates.

Louisiana passed One Door legislation in June. Mississippi created a task force to explore the reform. And Arkansas also recently approved an audit of its workforce and safety net programs to identify needed changes. Georgia should follow the lead of its southern neighbors to the West.

Welfare reform isn’t a second-tier issue. It’s central to sustaining Georgia’s current trajectory as a leader in economic opportunity. Georgia’s One Door gives the next governor a way to strengthen families, expand the workforce and set the state on a path to growth.

Read the full article here.

Buzz Brockway is the vice president of public policy at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

Eric Cochling in Governing

Originally published November 20, 2025

Starting in 2027, work requirements kick in for certain beneficiaries on Medicaid, while new work rules for the SNAP food assistance program took effect on Nov. 1. These reforms mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reflect a growing effort to make the safety net not only an important source of support but also a pathway to more opportunity and a better life.

The states, however, face significant challenges in implementing these new rules. America’s safety net “system” isn’t really a system at all. It’s a patchwork of more than 80 separate programs, each with its own database, rules, processes and hoops to jump through. These programs rarely coordinate or talk to each other and often feel inhumane to recipients.

For struggling Americans, accessing needed benefits means navigating a bureaucratic maze: Section 8 for housing assistance, SNAP for food support, Medicaid for health care and workforce programs for job training, for example. Each program brings a different caseworker, different eligibility requirements and endless paperwork. Caseworkers can’t see the full picture of what benefits a recipient receives or easily verify whether someone is working.

To implement new work requirements, these state systems must share information and coordinate, something they weren’t designed to do. A handful of states are starting to explore ways to consolidate their programs and integrate workforce development into the safety net. In doing so, they are creating the beginnings of a blueprint for other states to follow.

In June, for example, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the One Door to Work Act — the first step in a multiyear effort to align the state’s workforce and social services systems. The process began with a performance audit of key welfare programs that uncovered inefficiencies and a lack of coordination among agencies. Lawmakers then created a task force to recommend improvements, which ultimately led to the passage of One Door, bringing workforce development programs together under one roof while also integrating state SNAP and Medicaid eligibility systems.

With these reforms, Louisiana has made the most significant progress toward streamlining its safety net since Utah pioneered the One Door model in the 1990s, combining safety net and workforce development programs. Utah now boasts the lowest percentage of residents on Medicaid and food stamps, while simultaneously having consistently low unemployment rates.

Read the full article here.

Eric Cochling is chief program officer and general counsel at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

Joshua Crawford in Governing

Originally published October 31, 2025

 State leaders hoping to trim budgets by reducing prison populations are in for some disappointment. Proponents of decarceration often tout potential savings, but despite a 24 percent drop in state prison populations since 2010, corrections spending has continued to rise.

Over the past decade, states have enacted hundreds of criminal justice reforms — from reclassifying drug possessions to reducing mandatory minimum sentences — often with the promise of both greater fairness and lower costs. Yet while these policies have succeeded in driving down incarceration rates, they have failed to deliver the taxpayer savings that many conservative lawmakers expected when they pushed for criminal justice reform.

This is because incarcerating criminals is expensive. Using the aggregate division method — taking the total cost to incarcerate for a year and dividing it by the average number of inmates a state houses in a year — state per-prisoner expenditures range from $22,981 per prisoner per year in Arkansas to $307,468 in Massachusetts. So reducing the prison population by 100 people, decarceration advocates argue, should yield an annual savings of over $2.2 million in Arkansas and over $30 million in Massachusetts.

But in the years since the wave of reforms, neither overall state budgets nor department of corrections budgets have declined. In fact, state budgets increased in every state and state corrections budgets increased in all but two states. So why didn’t the promised fiscal benefits to taxpayers come to fruition?

First, it’s important to understand that state corrections budgets have always made up a relatively small percentage of overall state expenditures — never more than 5 percent. This is far below the cost of education (25-35 percent), public welfare (20-25 percent), highways (5-10 percent), and hospitals and health care (5-10 percent). It was always going to be hard to cut overall state spending by reducing one of the smaller budget items.

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Joshua Crawford is the Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity and the author of “Kids and Community Violence: Costs, Consequences, and Solutions” in the edited volume Doing Right by Kids.