Maxwell School News and Commentary

"I would include in this funding building opportunities/outlets for social cohesion, community engagement and civic participation," says Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, on how she would spend a hypothetical budget of $100 billion to solve the opioid crisis.

"Carter Page was doing business in Russia, talking to Russian diplomats who may have been involved in intelligence activities directed at the United States," says William C. Banks, professor of public administration and international affairs. "Game over. The standards are incredibly open-ended." 

"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.