Maxwell School News and Commentary

"Politicians are always looking to avoid blame," says Shana Gadarian, associate professor of political science. "It's not surprising that the IRS is one of the agencies where people are now going back, because people do notice if they don't get their tax refunds on time. What this is doing is to try and get the public to not notice, to smooth over some of the bumps we'll see if the shutdown continues much longer." 

According to University Professor Sean O'Keefe, "...it isn’t necessarily the beginning of a new space race as much as it is evidence that exploration beyond low Earth orbit is picking up momentum. That’s been a long time coming, but it signals the dawning of a new chapter of global ambitions to explore our neighborhood in this solar system." 

"Both sides are finding out that trade wars are painful," says Mary Lovely, professor of economics. "The Chinese economy is slowing. ...Foreign investment into the U.S. is down, and there is concern about domestic investment moving forward."

To reconcile the differences between the Antideficiency Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, Todd Dickey, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs, suggests that the government "could make clear when the government could lawfully pay FLSA-required wages for labor performed during a shutdown." 

Research by Uğur Altundal, a PhD student in political science at the Maxwell School, was cited in the Newsweek article "Ranked: The World's Least Powerful Passports in 2019." "Despite the important progress made in overall global mobility," Altundal and co-author Omer Zarpli write in their contribution to Henley and Partners annual report on global mobility, "there remains a significant ‘global mobility divide’, with some passports much more powerful than others." 01/11/19

Mary Lovely, professor of economics, notes that some Chinese goods have no alternative sourcing, and even when workarounds from other countries are available, they are often not perfect substitutes and lead to higher pricing for U.S. companies.

"If Congress had done a better job at clarifying immigration rules, laws, and statutes, which have been in need of reform for the last decade plus, then we wouldn't have this level of resorting to politicizing this issue because it would be clarified in the law," says Corri Zoli, research assistant professor of political science.