Iowa, a small midwestern state, finds itself in the national economic spotlight. For conservative commentators, Iowa has emerged as America’s tax-cutting champion, a paragon of fiscal responsibility. To critics it looks more like an example of economic recklessness.

Either way, Iowa is playing an outsized role in a bigger debate about how American states ought to manage their revenues and spending. Until a few years ago it had one of the highest income-tax rates in America. By 2026 it will be down to a flat tax of 3.9%. Iowa is far from alone. Some 25 states have cut individual income taxes over the past years. A handful, including Georgia and Idaho, are shifting to a flat tax. And a few others want to eliminate their income taxes altogether.

Virtually all states, regardless of political make-up, have lowered their citizens’ tax bills since 2021. Overall, this has been a rough decline in states’ tax revenues during this time, the steepest such reduction in at least four decades. But the most aggressive moves have been cuts to income taxes, and Iowa has been at the forefront of these efforts.

The Economist. A tax-cutting wave is sweeping over America’s states. Internet: <https://www.economist.com>. (adapted).

Based on the ideas of the preceding text and on its linguistic aspects, judge the following items.

Iowa, a small midwestern state, finds itself in the national economic spotlight. For conservative commentators, Iowa has emerged as America’s tax-cutting champion, a paragon of fiscal responsibility. To critics it looks more like an example of economic recklessness.

Either way, Iowa is playing an outsized role in a bigger debate about how American states ought to manage their revenues and spending. Until a few years ago it had one of the highest income-tax rates in America. By 2026 it will be down to a flat tax of 3.9%. Iowa is far from alone. Some 25 states have cut individual income taxes over the past years. A handful, including Georgia and Idaho, are shifting to a flat tax. And a few others want to eliminate their income taxes altogether.

Virtually all states, regardless of political make-up, have lowered their citizens’ tax bills since 2021. Overall, this has been a rough decline in states’ tax revenues during this time, the steepest such reduction in at least four decades. But the most aggressive moves have been cuts to income taxes, and Iowa has been at the forefront of these efforts.

The Economist. A tax-cutting wave is sweeping over America’s states. Internet: <https://www.economist.com>. (adapted).

Based on the ideas of the preceding text and on its linguistic aspects, judge the following items.

Iowa, a small midwestern state, finds itself in the national economic spotlight. For conservative commentators, Iowa has emerged as America’s tax-cutting champion, a paragon of fiscal responsibility. To critics it looks more like an example of economic recklessness.

Either way, Iowa is playing an outsized role in a bigger debate about how American states ought to manage their revenues and spending. Until a few years ago it had one of the highest income-tax rates in America. By 2026 it will be down to a flat tax of 3.9%. Iowa is far from alone. Some 25 states have cut individual income taxes over the past years. A handful, including Georgia and Idaho, are shifting to a flat tax. And a few others want to eliminate their income taxes altogether.

Virtually all states, regardless of political make-up, have lowered their citizens’ tax bills since 2021. Overall, this has been a rough decline in states’ tax revenues during this time, the steepest such reduction in at least four decades. But the most aggressive moves have been cuts to income taxes, and Iowa has been at the forefront of these efforts.

The Economist. A tax-cutting wave is sweeping over America’s states. Internet: <https://www.economist.com>. (adapted).

Based on the ideas of the preceding text and on its linguistic aspects, judge the following items.

Responsible state fiscal policy requires more than just balancing the current year’s budget. It must also include ensuring that the budget is on a sustainable path. Otherwise, policymakers cannot have the lasting impact they hope for. This risk is especially high in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Record budget surpluses, driven largely by federal pandemic aid, empowered states to adopt historically large tax cuts and spending increases from 2021 to 2023.

State leaders must be able to assess whether their decisions will be affordable over the long term or will jeopardize their ability to solve state problems or even sustain programs and services in the future. Unfortunately, the nature of state budget processes discourages such long-term thinking. State policymakers devote much of their time to developing, enacting, and implementing annual or biennial budgets, a prime opportunity to achieve immediate policy goals.

One key strategy for changing this short-term focus is for states to use long-term budget assessments and budget stress tests to regularly measure risks, anticipate potential shortfalls, and identify ways to address impending challenges. Long-term budget assessments project revenue and spending several years into the future, and stress tests estimate the size of temporary budget shortfalls that would result from recessions or other economic events and gauge whether states are prepared for these events.

Internet:https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/ (adapted).

Considering the ideas conveyed in the previous text, as well as its linguistic aspects, judge the following items.

Responsible state fiscal policy requires more than just balancing the current year’s budget. It must also include ensuring that the budget is on a sustainable path. Otherwise, policymakers cannot have the lasting impact they hope for. This risk is especially high in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Record budget surpluses, driven largely by federal pandemic aid, empowered states to adopt historically large tax cuts and spending increases from 2021 to 2023.

State leaders must be able to assess whether their decisions will be affordable over the long term or will jeopardize their ability to solve state problems or even sustain programs and services in the future. Unfortunately, the nature of state budget processes discourages such long-term thinking. State policymakers devote much of their time to developing, enacting, and implementing annual or biennial budgets, a prime opportunity to achieve immediate policy goals.

One key strategy for changing this short-term focus is for states to use long-term budget assessments and budget stress tests to regularly measure risks, anticipate potential shortfalls, and identify ways to address impending challenges. Long-term budget assessments project revenue and spending several years into the future, and stress tests estimate the size of temporary budget shortfalls that would result from recessions or other economic events and gauge whether states are prepared for these events.

Internet:https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/ (adapted).

Considering the ideas conveyed in the previous text, as well as its linguistic aspects, judge the following items.

Responsible state fiscal policy requires more than just balancing the current year’s budget. It must also include ensuring that the budget is on a sustainable path. Otherwise, policymakers cannot have the lasting impact they hope for. This risk is especially high in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Record budget surpluses, driven largely by federal pandemic aid, empowered states to adopt historically large tax cuts and spending increases from 2021 to 2023.

State leaders must be able to assess whether their decisions will be affordable over the long term or will jeopardize their ability to solve state problems or even sustain programs and services in the future. Unfortunately, the nature of state budget processes discourages such long-term thinking. State policymakers devote much of their time to developing, enacting, and implementing annual or biennial budgets, a prime opportunity to achieve immediate policy goals.

One key strategy for changing this short-term focus is for states to use long-term budget assessments and budget stress tests to regularly measure risks, anticipate potential shortfalls, and identify ways to address impending challenges. Long-term budget assessments project revenue and spending several years into the future, and stress tests estimate the size of temporary budget shortfalls that would result from recessions or other economic events and gauge whether states are prepared for these events.

Internet:https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/ (adapted).

Considering the ideas conveyed in the previous text, as well as its linguistic aspects, judge the following items.

Responsible state fiscal policy requires more than just balancing the current year’s budget. It must also include ensuring that the budget is on a sustainable path. Otherwise, policymakers cannot have the lasting impact they hope for. This risk is especially high in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Record budget surpluses, driven largely by federal pandemic aid, empowered states to adopt historically large tax cuts and spending increases from 2021 to 2023.

State leaders must be able to assess whether their decisions will be affordable over the long term or will jeopardize their ability to solve state problems or even sustain programs and services in the future. Unfortunately, the nature of state budget processes discourages such long-term thinking. State policymakers devote much of their time to developing, enacting, and implementing annual or biennial budgets, a prime opportunity to achieve immediate policy goals.

One key strategy for changing this short-term focus is for states to use long-term budget assessments and budget stress tests to regularly measure risks, anticipate potential shortfalls, and identify ways to address impending challenges. Long-term budget assessments project revenue and spending several years into the future, and stress tests estimate the size of temporary budget shortfalls that would result from recessions or other economic events and gauge whether states are prepared for these events.

Internet:https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/ (adapted).

Considering the ideas conveyed in the previous text, as well as its linguistic aspects, judge the following items.

TEXT I

“All crimes are not created equal in the harm they cause: homicide is many times more harmful than shoplifting but in crime statistics where offences are counted by number, they appear equivalent. For example, in the UK for the year ending September 2019, there were 3,578,000 incidents of theft and 729 homicides (Office for National Statistics, 2019). An increase of 500 thefts would be a small change in the overall number of thefts and have little impact on police resources. 500 extra homicides would have large consequences both for the harm caused and the impact on police resources. In a number-only count, the additional 500 thefts or homicides would result in the same overall number of crimes, yet clearly the impacts are disparate.

This reality has led to the proposition of a “Harm Index” to measure how harmful different crimes are in proportion to the others. This approach adds a larger weight to more harmful crimes (e.g. homicide, rape and grievous bodily harm with intent), distinguishing them from less harmful types of crime (e.g. minor thefts, criminal damage and common assault). Practically, adoption of a harm index can allow targeting of the highest-harm places, the most harmful offenders, the most harmed victims, and can assist in identifying victim-offenders. Experimentally, use of a harm index can add an additional dimension to the usual measures of success or failure, by considering harm prevented as well as reductions in prevalence or frequency. For the police, creation of harm index could allow them to invest scarce resources in proportion to the harm of each offence type.

Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud (2016) propose that any index needs to meet three requirements in order to be considered a legitimate measure of harm: An index must meet a democratic standard, be reliable and also be adopted at minimal cost to the end user. To meet these requirements, Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud (2016) opted for using sentence starting points rather than maximum or average actual sentences. The sentencing starting point is used to calculate crime harm as it provides a baseline penalty relative to the crime. We propose that it is a better measure of harm caused by the crime than average actual sentences, which are offender-focused and thus substantially affected by previous offending history.

The Cambridge Crime Harm Consensus proposes creation of seven statistics for counting crime, usefully including separation of historic crime reports, creation of a harm detection fraction and separation of public reported crime and those detected by proactive police activity, with the aim of providing the public with a more reliable and realistic assessment of trends, patterns and differences in public safety.
Counting crime by harm is an idea that has spread beyond the United Kingdom with indices published for Denmark (Andersen and Mueller-Johnson, 2018), Sweden (Karrholm et al. 2020), Western Australia (House and Neyroud, 2018), California (Mitchell, 2017), New Zealand and other countries.”

Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing. Available at: https://www.cambridge-ebp.co.uk/the-chi Accessed on: June 30, 2024.

TEXT I

“All crimes are not created equal in the harm they cause: homicide is many times more harmful than shoplifting but in crime statistics where offences are counted by number, they appear equivalent. For example, in the UK for the year ending September 2019, there were 3,578,000 incidents of theft and 729 homicides (Office for National Statistics, 2019). An increase of 500 thefts would be a small change in the overall number of thefts and have little impact on police resources. 500 extra homicides would have large consequences both for the harm caused and the impact on police resources. In a number-only count, the additional 500 thefts or homicides would result in the same overall number of crimes, yet clearly the impacts are disparate.

This reality has led to the proposition of a “Harm Index” to measure how harmful different crimes are in proportion to the others. This approach adds a larger weight to more harmful crimes (e.g. homicide, rape and grievous bodily harm with intent), distinguishing them from less harmful types of crime (e.g. minor thefts, criminal damage and common assault). Practically, adoption of a harm index can allow targeting of the highest-harm places, the most harmful offenders, the most harmed victims, and can assist in identifying victim-offenders. Experimentally, use of a harm index can add an additional dimension to the usual measures of success or failure, by considering harm prevented as well as reductions in prevalence or frequency. For the police, creation of harm index could allow them to invest scarce resources in proportion to the harm of each offence type.

Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud (2016) propose that any index needs to meet three requirements in order to be considered a legitimate measure of harm: An index must meet a democratic standard, be reliable and also be adopted at minimal cost to the end user. To meet these requirements, Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud (2016) opted for using sentence starting points rather than maximum or average actual sentences. The sentencing starting point is used to calculate crime harm as it provides a baseline penalty relative to the crime. We propose that it is a better measure of harm caused by the crime than average actual sentences, which are offender-focused and thus substantially affected by previous offending history.

The Cambridge Crime Harm Consensus proposes creation of seven statistics for counting crime, usefully including separation of historic crime reports, creation of a harm detection fraction and separation of public reported crime and those detected by proactive police activity, with the aim of providing the public with a more reliable and realistic assessment of trends, patterns and differences in public safety.
Counting crime by harm is an idea that has spread beyond the United Kingdom with indices published for Denmark (Andersen and Mueller-Johnson, 2018), Sweden (Karrholm et al. 2020), Western Australia (House and Neyroud, 2018), California (Mitchell, 2017), New Zealand and other countries.”

Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing. Available at: https://www.cambridge-ebp.co.uk/the-chi Accessed on: June 30, 2024.

TEXT I

“All crimes are not created equal in the harm they cause: homicide is many times more harmful than shoplifting but in crime statistics where offences are counted by number, they appear equivalent. For example, in the UK for the year ending September 2019, there were 3,578,000 incidents of theft and 729 homicides (Office for National Statistics, 2019). An increase of 500 thefts would be a small change in the overall number of thefts and have little impact on police resources. 500 extra homicides would have large consequences both for the harm caused and the impact on police resources. In a number-only count, the additional 500 thefts or homicides would result in the same overall number of crimes, yet clearly the impacts are disparate.

This reality has led to the proposition of a “Harm Index” to measure how harmful different crimes are in proportion to the others. This approach adds a larger weight to more harmful crimes (e.g. homicide, rape and grievous bodily harm with intent), distinguishing them from less harmful types of crime (e.g. minor thefts, criminal damage and common assault). Practically, adoption of a harm index can allow targeting of the highest-harm places, the most harmful offenders, the most harmed victims, and can assist in identifying victim-offenders. Experimentally, use of a harm index can add an additional dimension to the usual measures of success or failure, by considering harm prevented as well as reductions in prevalence or frequency. For the police, creation of harm index could allow them to invest scarce resources in proportion to the harm of each offence type.

Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud (2016) propose that any index needs to meet three requirements in order to be considered a legitimate measure of harm: An index must meet a democratic standard, be reliable and also be adopted at minimal cost to the end user. To meet these requirements, Sherman, Neyroud and Neyroud (2016) opted for using sentence starting points rather than maximum or average actual sentences. The sentencing starting point is used to calculate crime harm as it provides a baseline penalty relative to the crime. We propose that it is a better measure of harm caused by the crime than average actual sentences, which are offender-focused and thus substantially affected by previous offending history.

The Cambridge Crime Harm Consensus proposes creation of seven statistics for counting crime, usefully including separation of historic crime reports, creation of a harm detection fraction and separation of public reported crime and those detected by proactive police activity, with the aim of providing the public with a more reliable and realistic assessment of trends, patterns and differences in public safety.
Counting crime by harm is an idea that has spread beyond the United Kingdom with indices published for Denmark (Andersen and Mueller-Johnson, 2018), Sweden (Karrholm et al. 2020), Western Australia (House and Neyroud, 2018), California (Mitchell, 2017), New Zealand and other countries.”

Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing. Available at: https://www.cambridge-ebp.co.uk/the-chi Accessed on: June 30, 2024.