State Earned Income Tax Credits and “Making Work Pay”: How Maine Might Help Workers

Established in 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) became the federal government’s largest antipoverty program for citizens under the age of 65 by the mid-1990s. In this article, Glenn Beamer gives a brief overview of how the program works and how states have piggybacked on the federal EITC to further assist their working poor. He observes that Maine’s EITC policy does not fully avail itself of potential returns and points to other states with policies that provide greater benefits for the working poor. He suggests that expanding Maine’s EITC not only would provide working Mainers with extra income, but also would direct resources to parts of the state that are struggling economically

Service Learning: What\u27s a Political Scientist Doing in Yonkers?

As an urban politics teacher, I discerned a disconnect between what I said about urban politics and what my students understood. Although I offered a variety of perspectives, I nonetheless felt that students were coming to class, and leaving class, with their opinions -- liberal, conservative, and in-between -- formed. Because of the constraints on dialogue about urban politics, I decided to develop a service learning project focusing on urban homelessness and housing. The project would combine elements of a typical undergraduate course and a participant observation project. I wanted a setting in which the students and I would learn together about urban policy problems and better understand their complexity. The shared experience of working in an urban neighborhood for a week would, in a sense, serve as a text, although this text would be experienced and discussed contemporaneously

How “Humane” Is Your Endpoint?—Refining the Science-Driven Approach for Termination of Animal Studies of Chronic Infection

Public concern on issues such as animal welfare or the scientific validity and clinical value of animal research is growing, resulting in increasing regulatory demands for animal research. Abiding to the most stringent animal welfare standards, while having scientific objectives as the main priority, is often challenging. To do so, endpoints of studies involving severe, progressive diseases need to be established considering how early in the disease process the scientific objectives can be achieved. We present here experimental studies of tuberculosis (TB) in mice as a case study for an analysis of present practice and a discussion of how more refined science-based endpoints can be developed. A considerable proportion of studies in this field involve lethal stages, and the establishment of earlier, reliable indicators of disease severity will have a significant impact on animal welfare. While there is an increasing interest from scientists and industry in moving research in this direction, this is still far from being reflected in actual practice. We argue that a major limiting factor is the absence of data on biomarkers that can be used as indicators of disease severity. We discuss the possibility of complementing the widely used weight loss with other relevant biomarkers and the need for validation of these parameters as endpoints. Promotion of ethical guidelines needs to be coupled with systematic research in order to develop humane endpoints beyond the present euthanasia of moribund animals. Such research, as we propose here for chronic infection, can show the way for the development and promotion of welfare policies in other fields of research. Research on chronic infection relies heavily on the use of animals, as only the integral animal body can model the full aspect of an infection. That animals are generally made to develop a disease in infection studies exacerbates the tension between human benefit and animal well-being, which characterizes all biomedical research with animals. Scientists typically justify animal research with reference to potential human benefits, but if accepting the assumption that human benefits can offset animal suffering, it still needs to be argued that the same benefits could not be achieved with less negative effects on animal welfare. Reducing the animal welfare problems associated with research (“refinement” [1]) is therefore crucial in order to render animal-based research less of an ethical problem and to assure public trust in research. Studies that are designed to measure time of death or survival percentages present a particularly challenging situation in which at least some of the animals are made to die from the disease. These studies are frequent in experimental research on severe infections. The scientific community, industry, and regulatory authorities have responded to the ethical concerns over studies in which animals die from severe disease by developing new policies and guidelines for the implementation of humane endpoints as a key refinement measure (e.g., [2]–[4]). The most widely used definition considers a humane endpoint to be the earliest indicator in an animal experiment of severe pain, severe distress, suffering, or impending death [5], underlining that ideally such indicators should be identified before the onset of the most severe effects. Euthanizing animals, rather than awaiting their “spontaneous” death, is important to avoid unnecessary suffering in studies in which data on survival is thought to be required for scientific or legal reasons. However, several questions remain open regarding how humane endpoints are to be applied to address real animal welfare problems. We used TB experiments in mice as a case study to highlight the potential to establish biomarkers of disease progress that can replace survival time as a measure of disease severity.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/38337/2007)

Dairy product inventories and price movement relationships in the absence of effective price supports

Firms hold inventories for a variety of reasons, including the attempt to align availability with consumption, thus smoothing prices across time. Governments may hold inventories to support price levels when production is high relative to demand which also serves to smooth prices. Conventional wisdom suggests that the existence of such government stocks will affect the behavior of firms holding commercial inventories. In 1985, surplus accumulation prompted the United States government to lower support prices to the point that market prices moved free of the support. This change in dairy policy provides an opportunity for the empirical investigation of commercial inventory behavior under different policy regimes. The purpose of this research is to examine price movements in the dairy industry and the role of inventory behavior in price determination. The impact of storage behavior on price movements are examined through a structural model of the dairy industry incorporating a competitive storage industry. Optimal commercial storage rules are derived under different governmental policy regimes. These storage rules are examined in both a static and dynamic framework. Examination of optimal storage rules supports the proposition that agents providing storage adjust their behavior under different policy regimes. With an effective price floor, agents are more likely to hold inventories at low levels of availability but increase inventories at a decreasing rate. At higher availabilities, agents rely on the government to remove surplus from the market. When no support price is in effect, agents exhibit a constant marginal propensity to store. Comparing storage rules to actual market observations suggests that agents adjust their behavior rapidly when policies are changed. Simulations indicate that optimal storage behavior can result in highly variable prices when no support price is in effect

Creative politics: Taxation, public goods, and particular benefits in a federal system of government.

Federalism creates new channels in which elected officials at all levels of government attempt to maximize the goods and services they provide their constituents while minimizing the taxes necessary to pay for such goods and services. In the federal system in the United States, state legislators seek to minimize taxes either by shifting costs onto the federal or local governments or by maximizing the assistance they receive from the federal government. The structural avenues federalism creates for politics are only part of the story. Extensive interviews with state legislators demonstrate that elected officials attempt not only to shift tax burdens onto other governments, but that they also design public policies with the goals of maximizing services, improving the well-being of their constituents, and offering policies that will enjoy political acceptance among their electorates. From case studies, I have distilled six principles to which legislators refer in making governing decisions including revenue dependability, obscurability, vertical and horizontal transferability, equity and accountability. These principles lead legislators to shape policies in politically acceptable ways even if such designs imply economic irrationality. The structural avenues introduced by federalism and the overlapping politics created by these avenues influence state legislators to alter policies from their own ideals. The research offers a new understanding of a component of representation in federal systems by considering how elected officials relationships at one level of government are affected by the simultaneous relationships their constituents have with elected officials at other levels of government. It also provides evidence regarding political linkages legislators make between taxes and services. I offer an understanding of how the nature of services, whether they are public goods or particular benefits, influences support for them and the taxes that finance them. I explicitly consider the nature of public goods and its influence upon the mix of goods and services state governments provide. Because a public good can be consumed by one citizen without decreasing its availability to other citizens, state officials have both a political and economic incentive to shift from programs offering particular benefits to programs with characteristics of public goods.Ph.D.Political ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104742/1/9610075.pdfDescription of 9610075.pdf : Restricted to UM users only