The city of Pittsburgh is apparently looking to tax college tuition in order to pay the pensions of retired public sector employees. In a way, this is an impressive feat; it would actually be difficult to design a less optimal use of taxing and spending. Maybe if you directly taxed literacy and used the money to subsidize illiteracy it would be worse. You could tax good parenting and subsize child abuse. Maybe if you taxed recycling and subsidized pouring motor oil into bodies of water it would be worse. Either way, impressive feat, Pittsburgh.
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6 comments
Comments feed for this article
Wednesday ~ December 16th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Alternatives to Pittsburgh’s Tuition Tax « Student Activism
[...] to design a worse tax structure than this — difficult, but perhaps not impossible. And he has some ideas for what they might try [...]
Wednesday ~ December 16th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Too bad you can't tax stupid - Economics -
[...] is the paragraph of the day, from Adam Ozimek:The city of Pittsburgh is apparently looking to tax college tuition in order to pay the pensions [...]
Wednesday ~ December 16th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
teageegeepea
I believe both Robin Hanson & Bryan Caplan have suggested it makes sense to tax education, since they believe it is mostly zero-sum “signalling”.
Wednesday ~ December 16th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Adam Ozimek
teageegeepea, even if that were true at a national level, it’s crazy at a city level. It’s very very easy to avoid that tax at the city level by going to school somewhere else, draining pittsburgh of brains and potential workers. It would have a much lower distortionary impact at the national level.
Friday ~ December 18th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
happyjuggler0
There are two posts that link to this one Adam. One of them gets your name right, and the other credits Karl. Sadly the one by “student activism” is the one that can’t read correctly….
The one that correctly credits you actually adds value to your link instead of merely repeating your post.
Saturday ~ December 19th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Karl Smith
We need an About page for Adam. Still waiting for a bio from him to post it up.