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Jan 21, 2025 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
Around election time, voters nearly always name “the economy” at or near the top of their list of concerns. The post-mortem since the Nov. 5 election of Donald Trump revealed that Dems need to pay much more attention to economic messaging: what to tell voters, how to script it and by what channels of communication. A major problem immediately arises: economists communicate with each other in a professional vocabulary that is difficult to translate into plain English.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
jsonline.com | William Holahan |Matthew Flynn
The UW System was created to increase access to higher education across the geography of the state and across the income divide. Splitting the system could change this. William Holahan and Matthew Flynn | Milwaukee Journal SentinelShow Caption Hide Caption Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted a UW Board of Regents meetingPro-Palestinian protesters disrupted a UW Board of Regents meeting on the UW-Madison campus. They were escorted out and continued their protest outside the building.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (nces.ed.gov), 33% of Wisconsin 8th graders scored “proficient” in math. Meanwhile, occupational pay data (e.g., payscale.com) shows that the top earning disciplines tend to be in STEM—science technology engineering and math—plus STEM-adjacent application areas like economics, finance, statistics and computer science.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
When critical economic topics like the national debt come up, whether on the campaign trail, in debates, or media coverage, the tone and tenor of campaign rhetoric usually leads to over-simplification. The debt is typically presented simply as a scary number—currently it is $34 trillion, or 123% of GDP (one year's national income)—and political parties and candidates are compared on their contribution to that total.
Not all debt is created equal, however.
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Aug 7, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
Former President Donald Trump is counting on voter amnesia as he campaigns for a second term. He especially wants them to forget 2020, the chaotic last year of his presidency.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
When Republican Eric Hovde announced his candidacy to challenge Tammy Baldwin, two-term U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, he included in his opening speech a standard party message: he’s in favor of “freedom.” But what does that mean to voters?
This version of freedom is not an invocation of the sacred oath to defend the nation’s Constitution against “all enemies foreign and domestic.” Nor is it a reference to FDR’s Four Freedoms, nor the freedoms set forth in the Bill of Rights.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
Every year the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change issues its report, and every year the panel’s warnings are more dire. We recently learned that 2023 was the hottest year on record by far, and that CO2 and methane emissions must be brought under control soon or the target of zero net emissions by 2050 will not be met.
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Mar 5, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
Often public policy questions center on the division of responsibility between the levels of our government and the market. For example, how extensively should government intervene in the market for the extraction, refinement and sale of fossil fuels; or the market for health insurance; or for higher education?
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Feb 6, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
Donald Trump is beginning to put out vague policy statements—building the wall to shut off the southern border; immigration; drill, drill, drill. Included in the hit list is the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Despite over 70 attempts to repeal the ACA failed during his presidency, Trump apparently thinks it’s good strategy to try again, at the least to attract votes and donations from his base.
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Jan 16, 2024 | 
shepherdexpress.com | William Holahan
Republicans routinely affix the “Socialist” label to Democrats and their policies. The assertion is repeated so frequently that many voters have come to regard it as the truth, and so it is an effective vote-getter. Time-tested economic understanding—going back to Adam Smith—provides a rigorous and vigorous response to this scare tactic: the economic distortions commonly attributed to socialist systems are also produced by government made unrepresentative by gerrymandering.
