Paul Caron

Pew Research Center, Growing Partisan Divide Over Fairness of the Nation’s Tax System: [O]verall public views of the fairness of the nation’s tax system have changed only modestly since 2017, before passage of major tax legislation. Today, 64% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the present tax system is very or moderately fair; just half as many Democrats and Democratic leaners (32%) view the tax system as fair. The share of Republicans who say the tax system is fair has increased 21 percentage points since 2017. Today, 64% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the present tax system is very or moderately fair; just half as many Democrats and Democratic leaners (32%) view the tax system as fair.

From Assessment Pros: Ask the many assessment haters in higher education who is most to blame for what they perceive as the fixation on trying to measure student learning outcomes, and they are likely to put accreditors at the top of the list. Which is why it was so unexpected last week to hear a group of experts on student learning tell attendees at a regional accreditor's conference here that most assessment activity to date has been a "hot mess" and that efforts to "measure" how much students learn should be used help individual students and improve the quality of instruction, not to judge the performance of colleges and universities. The panel's title built off the conference's theme of "provocative questions and courageous answers," and asked, in regard to teaching, learning and assessment, "is higher education accomplishing what it said it would? " But at its core, the discussion revolved largely around whether the way most colleges currently have gone about trying to judge whether their students are learning (by defining student learning outcomes and finding some way to gauge whether they have achieved those goals) helps institutions (and helps higher education collectively) prove they are doing a good job.

Such experiments can be revenue-neutral, with the tax authority ensuring ex post that average tax revenues received from taxpayers in the treatment and control groups are equal. Non-revenue-neutral experiments raise greater concerns about horizontal inequity, but they may be helpful in addressing questions about effects of tax rates and in increasing participation. This Article has considered a range of possible applications of tax experimentation, from relatively small issues such as the entertainment deduction to foundational questions about the effect of marginal tax rates on labor supply and even the effect of tax policies on taxpayer health. Perhaps one reason that the possibility of tax experiments has been neglected is that it seems politically implausible that the government would randomly assign taxpayers to different tax rates, let alone assign different municipalities to different tax rules.

The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues. At the time of Vojtko’s death, those working without the possibility of tenure — and in many cases on a course-by-course, semester-to-semester basis, without salary or benefits — made up about two-thirds of all college instructors in America. Appeals to empathy and outrage gin up so much hot, concentrated concern — witness the outrage after Vojtko’s death, and the more recent death of Thea Hunter, an adjunct professor of history — but inevitably, America’s colleges and universities were designed to serve students and create knowledge through the teaching, research, and stability that come with the longevity of tenured faculty, but higher education today is dominated by adjuncts.