Op-Ed by IRIS PIs on how Tax bill would imperil nation’s innovation, future
Dec 15, 2017, 10:47 AM
In a piece in the Columbus Dispatch on December 14, 2017, IRIS PI Bruce Weinberg, with IRIS PI co-authors Julia Lane and Jason Owen-Smith, discuss the value of research spending and harmful portions of the tax bill passed by the House.
The Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) is a national collaborative that has built the data and tools that allow researchers, government agencies, policy makers, and others assess the social and economic impact of academic research. IRIS is an outgrowth of UMETRICS, the Big Ten Academic Alliance's groundbreaking effort to build and provide a data platform for large-scale systematic analysis of the infrastructure and outcomes of university-based science.
In a piece in the Columbus Dispatch on December 14, 2017, IRIS PI Bruce Weinberg, with IRIS PI co-authors Julia Lane and Jason Owen-Smith, discuss the value of research spending and harmful portions of the tax bill passed by the House.
They explain the House bill increases taxes on graduate students which would dim our economic future — innovative workforce, startups, productive firms, competitive industries, even future tax revenue. IRIS data helps to provide the evidence of the value graduate students play in university research and in the growth of higher-paying jobs.
Bruce Weinberg: “Why are we so sure? Because we are looking at evidence. The Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), founded by my co-authors, Julia Lane from New York University and Jason Owen-Smith from the University of Michigan, and me is a consortium of major research universities who share data to make just these kinds of analyses possible. We combine confidential data from universities and the U.S. Census Bureau for the first time to examine the careers of people trained in research. These data allow us to more fully understand how graduate students play key roles in research and its results. In 2015, nearly 43 percent of employees (more than 51,000 people) paid by federal grants at 23 IRIS universities were students.”
Read The Columbus Dispatch: Bruce Weinberg: Tax bill would imperil nation’s innovation, future