Maxwell School News and Commentary

"This is not a burden increase. People who qualify for premium tax credits and drop insurance are better off doing it (their cost of insurance doesn't change). Worse off are those who have incomes too high to qualify for credits and would face much higher premiums," says Len Burman, Paul Volcker Chair in Behavioral Economics.

"When you see a piece of misinformation, even when it’s in the context of being corrected and you believe the correction, it can still have lingering effects on your attitudes," says Emily Thorson, assistant professor of political science.

"Because the Democratic Party has been moving steadily to the left in recent decades, it will be hard for them to simultaneously appeal to the ideologically liberal base that has been created along with this shift and to white middle Americans who view their interests to be in direct conflict with some of those who make up the liberal bloc of the Democratic coalition," says Danielle Thomsen, assistant professor of political science.

Leonard Burman, professor of public administration and international affairs, opines that President Reagan "got people excited about the idea of fixing our broken tax system. It’s hard to imagine President Trump doing that.” 

"A lot of the debate about taxes is really a debate about spending," says Leonard Burman, professor of public administration and international affairs. "What is the role of government, and what is the value of government spending? Those tend to be the real underlying question."

Gary Engelhardt, professor of economics, and his team's research concluded that people who continued to work past retirement age enjoyed an increase in the size of their networks of family and friends of 25 percent. The social networks of retired people, on the other hand, shrank during the five-year period.

William Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, was quoted in The New York Times article, "Trump Orders a Wall Built, but Congress Holds the Checkbook." In theory, Mr. Trump could order the military to spend extra money to protect national security, then move around the funding within the bureaucracy to pay for a wall built by the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Banks said.

Given how nasty and intractable the conflicts in our society can be, Keith Bybee, professor of political science, argues that it is naïve to imagine we can somehow transcend our clashing sets of values and miraculously agree on what counts as acceptable behavior and tolerable opinion.