If smart students choose selective schools and smartness is associated with ROI, we would expect to see a correlation between ROI and school selectivity. That we don't is interesting.
If merit is highly correlated with school selectivity, then selectivity can be considered a proxy for smartness/determination/etc. If that's the case, education ROI appears to be not strongly correlated with merit (via the selectivity proxy). That is very interesting.
The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for.
> It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school"
A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their lifetimes than the future value of their lifetime payments, meaning that the system is only financially sound if we assume the working population will grow at an appropriate rate such that we'll always have enough workers to pay for retirees.
Or, adjusting the analogies you provided: we are borrowing from other countries to pay for our schools and fire departments. This happens to be true. Is it bad? Unknown.
Not the working population, simply the tax revenue.
You could theoretically have one robot producing trillions of $ and tax that one robot and pay for everything.
That's one of the reasons why everyone's obsessed with growth, if the economy grows, the tax budget goes up without tax rates going up so the country can afford to pay for more stuff.
Good point. That's why it's likely the youth and the not-yet-born will pay a higher percent of their lifetime incomes in taxes while probably receiving less benefit. Americans have a history of voting wealth transfers to themselves from their grandchildren.
The author excluded roads financed by gasoline tax from the analysis. I don't remember reading about sales and income taxes in the article, but perhaps those are in the same category.
My point was that it's not necessarily that there aren't enough taxes, but the problem could be misallocation on bombs and baby boomer pensions. By ignoring the majority of the taxes, this analysis is incomplete.
Yikes. Yes, of course technology is driven by human preferences. But, No, humans must occasionally accept that certain habits are not sustainable given current and near-future technologies.
I generally agree with your position but in this particular scenario the people with the greatest capacity to adjust their behavior are the people who will be affected the least financially by a hike in peak prices and thus less likely to change or more likely to invest in solar at home, while those with the least flexibility in work arrangements and spending, e.g. lower income earners working in the services sector, will be affected negatively the most and unable to work around it.
If the spot market was the status quo, and someone was suggesting a change to the current system of flat prices, one could make the same argument. (Ie already well off people are flexible enough to make use of the new system better.)
More variant pricing will better distribute usage. The unfortunate effects on the poor can be negated by a sales tax paid back to all citizens equally as a lump sum.
Super difficult. We recovered 40% from banks who were willing to look at our evidence. Turns out there was no international banking law that deals with stuff like this. Banks basically make their own decision whether who's right/wrong. The banks in Dubai and Far East basically told us to pound sand. We ended up threatening to sue our regional bank. They covered 20%. So we ended up losing 40%. The funny thing was FBI was involved. You'd think these guys are hot to trot. The guy we spoke to basically sounded like a local policeman whom you just told you lost your bike. "Oh yeah, we are tracking down leads". Net net, don't hire dumb people who can easily get phished. Once the money is gone, it almost always never come back. We counted ourselves lucky that we only lost 40% instead of 100% which is common from what we learned.
