Faculty & Research

Transcript

Taxes are politics. So if you think about what we do with taxes is we use them to pay for government services, and we use them to set economic incentives. And so what should be the size of government that we need to pay for, and how many government services should we provide? That’s a political question. How big should the military be? That’s a political question. How much aid should we give to low-income households? That’s a political question.

It’s hard to pin down politicians on actual tax reform. And part of that is—and I get it—there’s some uncertainty about what the composition of Congress is going to look like, right? And so depending on whether Democrats or Republicans take the House or the Senate in the presidency, that can create a lot of different scenarios for how much compromise you’re going to have, right? So there’s a sweep, for example. Now you don’t need to talk to anybody about enacting your tax reform, right? Now you can just do what you want as a party. If you have divided government, now there’s more negotiation and compromise, and it gets trickier. And, I mean, it can always be tricky, even if you have just slim margins, right? And so [there’s] some sense of excitement, I think, around election time with enough, I don’t know, skepticism about how much uncertainty there is in the process—understanding that, again, the key question about what’s going to happen with taxes, given the election, is politics. How much do people want to pay for government services and what kind of economic incentives [do] we want to enact?

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There’s a number of reasons why some groups are more exposed to toxins and other pollutants in their homes. Low-income groups and people of color have borne the brunt of pollution in the United States for decades. The evidence on this goes back to the earliest work in the environmental justice field in the 1980s, and since that time, researchers have uncovered a number of explanations.

One is that pollution sources have typically been cited in disadvantaged communities, often because the groups there have lacked the social or political capital to fight back.
Another is that low-income individuals may end up being forced into trade-offs between, for example, having adequate resources to feed their families versus living further away from pollution. To a large extent, inequality and pollution exposure in our country is a result of income inequality.

A third explanation is that discrimination may constrain the choices available to households of color, making it hard for them to find housing options in unpolluted neighborhoods, even if they have the resources to afford those options.
Much of our research here at UW–Madison deals with the mechanisms leading to these forms of environmental injustice and suggesting policy responses to deal with them.

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One thing people often get wrong about entrepreneurship is they think of it as being risky. The reality of it is, in the modern era there are a variety of tools and approaches available to entrepreneurs that can limit their downside financial losses of potentially engaging in entrepreneurship—in that entrepreneurship really might involve periods of low income or no income but the riskiness of engaging in that entrepreneurship really can be limited on the downside. If you think about it in a different way, if you commit to yourself to pursuing a career in entrepreneurship, meaning ‘I’m going to start five or eight companies before I retire,’ the odds of one of those becoming quite successful—if you pursue that in a reasoned and educated manner—are actually quite high.