Shifting from income taxes to gas taxes

A lot of people are complaining about rising gas prices. The funny thing is that gas has been historically underpriced for some time now. Gas has a lot of negative social effects that are not taken into account in the price (or the current gas tax, for the most part). Depending on who you ask, these include the costs of highway construction, urban sprawl, traffic accidents and fatalities, national security, strip malls, pollution, suburban jerkwads, noise, traffic jams, weaker neighborhoods, civil wars, terrorism, misplaced foreign policy priorities, etc.

The problem is that people who aren't involved in the transaction of buying gas are negatively affected by the purchase anyway. This sort of thing shows up all the time in economics, and we call them "externalies". That is, effects that are external to the parties of the transaction.

Externalities demand government intervention, and one important way of correcting externalities is taxation. Cigarette taxes partially offset the Medicare and Medicaid costs of smoking, as well as some of the effects of secondhand smoke. The higher resulting price of cigarettes drives down consumption a little, too.

The problem is that gas taxes are nowhere nearly high enough to adjust for the negative effects of buying and selling gasoline.

Nobody likes higher taxes though, and what would the government do with all the money generated by the tax? Lower income taxes. It wouldn't be that hard to set it up to be "revenue neutral", so the resulting effect on net government revenues is zero. And you could target the tax cuts to the brackets that spend the highest proportions of their incomes on gas--the lower and middle classes.

The only resulting effect would be that those who buy a lot more gas than others in their tax bracket would see a net loss, and those who buy less get a net gain. Overall everyone buys less.

So then gas company profits drop back to normal levels, stopping inefficient investment into that sector. We buy less foreign oil, decreasing our dependence on unsavory governments (like Russia). We can stop the madness of urban sprawl and neverending chain restaurants. We can build strong, contiguous neighborhoods. We can increase urban density, move closer to things we like, spend less time in traffic, and more time walking or biking. We can get fresher air, less cancer, more friends, and fewer friends dying in car wrecks.

What do you say? Are you with me?

Playing for last, and Comps

So, the NBA draft order was announced last night, it got me thinking. Towards the end of a season, crappy teams often have more to gain by losing than winning, because if they lose then they are more likely to get a better draft pick for next year.

What if some teams took this to the extreme and did everything possible to lose?

In the NFL this would be tough because there are a ton of rules that automatically penalize you. I imagine it wouldn't be any fun to watch a game like that.

But in the NBA, it is completely legal for a team to score points on the opponent's goal. So what I'm thinking is this:

A team inbounds the ball under their opponent's hoop. Then they try to score on that hoop. The other team plays defense as usual, and if they get the ball, they have to make a halfcourt shot (or call timeout) to get the ball back to the other side of the court. If a team does succeed in scoring on the wrong basket, the other team gets two (or three) points, but the losing team gets the ball back. The most important aspect is that a team only has 8 seconds to get it across halfcourt, so they have to either score in those 8 seconds, turn the ball over, or make a halfcourt shot.

You see what I'm saying? This could really be a fun game to watch, without changing any of the standard rules of basketball. I told someone about this and I'm told there's an episode of South Park that is really similar: kids compete to lose at Little League so that they don't have to go to tournaments and play more.

One problem is that fouls would be shot on the wrong basket. You'd have to miss the first intentionally, then bounce the second off the glass really hard, get the rebound, and try to take a halfcourt shot. I'm not sure what happens when so many of a team's players get fouls that they can't put 5 guys on the court. That could be a small snag.

....

In other news, I have comprehensive exams for microeconomics on Monday, and macro next Friday. I have to retake any exam that I fail (with different questions), and if I fail any exam twice then I am out of the program. High stakes!

The worst part is that if you have to retake an exam then you have 6 more weeks to study for it. And 6 weeks less of having fun and doing research. Ouch.

I better get back to studying so I can knock these suckers out the first time.