Transportation secretary Ray LaHood and a congressional committee have recently been pushing the notion of a mileage tax (instead of a gas tax) to raise dollars for highways. This is such a bad idea, I’m having trouble understanding how it could garner so much support. The problem is that Americans are driving more fuel efficient cars, so the gas tax isn’t making as much revenue. Rather than increasing the gas tax which LaHood argues is a bad idea during a recession, LaHood wants to charge a tax by miles driven. Why is this stupid? Let me count the ways:
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Feb 282009
Feb 272009
Imagine that you’re a sociologist studying childhood conflict, and you want to know what kinds of parenting techniques are most likely to calm fighting children down and get them to play nice. So you set up an experiment. You put pairs of siblings in different rooms, and then when they start to fight you have the parents enter the room and do whatever it was that you want them to do. Then you observe whether or not the parents effectively calmed the children down. But of course, simply the presence of the parent, in most cases, is enough to temporarily stop the fighting. So if you really want to know if the kids are calmed down and willing to play nice, you have to have the parent exit the room first. The presence of the parent changes the dynamic, but in a way that everyone there knows is temporary. The kids know that the parent will leave soon, and even a child who is intent on attacking his brother will usually be perfectly happy to play nice and wait for mom or dad to walk out of the room before resuming the fight.
In a nutshell, that is exactly what’s happening in Iraq right now. Continue reading »
When I think about my own education, there are half are four courses in particular that stand out to me as having the greatest impact on my daily life. My undergraduate introductory statistics course taught me about the nature of probability and data. My high school theory of knowledge course taught me about the myriad of different ways that people strive for truth and the wide variety of meanings that “truth” can have. My modern British literature and 20th century American history courses taught me how to communicate effectively and succinctly. Those were not necessarily the most enjoyable courses I took, nor even the courses that I learned the most in. But those are the ones whose lessons I draw on most frequently and in the widest variety of circumstances–that most affect how I read the news, how I think about God, how I write, and how I interpret the world I live in. None of those lessons was taught to me in a science, engineering, or classical mathematics course. (The statistics course I am referring to was the non-calculus statistics course that was aimed at non-majors and considered not rigorous enough by the mathematics and engineering degrees. It was nicknamed “stat too easy” after it’s catalog number Stat 280.)
That is exactly why it always upsets me when I see articles like this one, which describes how universities are cutting back on the humanities. Continue reading »
What would a realistic proposal to eliminate the federal budget deficit look like?
This year’s budget deficit is going to be astronomical–probably topping $1300 billion (I’m using billions instead of trillions to make things more easily comparable). That’s the whole point of an economic stimulus package: to run a massive budget deficit and thereby inject money into the economy. Thankfully, the vast majority of money spent in that stimulus package is one-time projects that will not add to the long-term cost of governance. The same goes for the auto bailouts, the bank bailouts, and any future stimulus packages that we might spend.
So how big is the ongoing deficit–that is the part of the deficit that we had last year, and can expect next year given a modest economic recovery? My best guess is somewhere between $500 and $600 billion–still massive, but much more manageable.
So, how do we eliminate a $500 billion deficit?
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Feb 202009
I hate wow stats.
A new anti-stimulus ad is making some buzz right now because it claims that if someone were to have spent $1 million dollars every day for the two thousand years since Jesus were born, that that person still would not have spent as much as Obama’s stimulus package will cost this year alone.
Sounds impressive right? I bet your first thought is “that can’t possibly be right!” Actually, it is. Continue reading »
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