Category: Business/Technology

University of Wisconsin-Madison public affairs assistant professor and property tax expert Ross Milton said it is hard to find academic literature with “real world evidence” of how higher property taxes are shared between tenants and landlords.

He said renters voting Tuesday should be aware that landlords can decide to make them bear the brunt of higher property taxes. However, Milton added that property companies can raise rent whenever they want in Wisconsin, regardless of a new tax. “We don’t have rent control in Wisconsin,” Milton said.

It is not yet clear whether the bill that passed the House will get a vote in the Senate. President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill if it passes.

Even if that happens, there would surely be legal challenges, said University of Wisconsin-Madison law school professor Anuj Desai.

“I suspect the government’s first defense, so to speak, is this is not a ban on TikTok,” Desai said. “It is an attempt to get ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company.”

One point right off the bat: The 2020 fiscal year ended in September 2020, which means the numbers include the last few months of former President Donald Trump’s time in office.

Overall, Hovde is “pretty close on the actual numbers,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, Chinn said, “the basic point is that the numbers are meaningless.”

Menzie Chinn, a macroeconomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the rise in state construction employment may be tied to a larger national construction boom. Chinn said about one-fifth of the change in employment for January and February is tied to nonresidential construction.

“There’s a big boom in the building of commercial (properties). Not commercial as in stores, but factories,” he said. “I don’t know how much of that is in Wisconsin, but nationwide, that’s a very big factor. There’s a lot of construction going on.”

“There has not been a line in terms of what modifications are okay,” said Dietram Scheufele, who studies misinformation and social media at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Public opinion about what’s acceptable in altering content has changed, such as editing photos of ourselves on Instagram or LinkedIn, he said.

“If some deepfake comes out of Biden falling down repeatedly right before the election in key states, and it all turns out to be fake five days later, that’s completely irrelevant,” Scheufele said. “We don’t have video-assisted review like we have in in football, which means the game will have ended and the result will stand.”

“I do not think this is about fairness – premiums are set based on accident rates and risks associated with different demographic groups and would be higher if the groups are involved in higher rates of accidents or other damages,” said Nancy Wong, Kohl’s Chair in Retail Innovation, Professor of Consumer Science, Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.