Seems to be making the rounds.
Over at Forbes, there's a bit on the notion of funding university education via an income tax on graduates.
Which sounds kinda like Single Payer for education: a great way to get votes, but, as with demand-side economics in general, an even better way to create perverse incentives.
Look, decoupling costs from consumption doesn't bring down costs! It just hides them, so that no one has a visible incentive (nor meaningful ability) to control them.
Sure, it'd be fun to spend years and years hanging out at the university, studying interesting subjects of no economic value... and maybe never actually graduating, so the graduate tax never applies. You can take classes part time while working at some non-degree job, right? Endless consumption, at no cost to the consumer: what could possibly go wrong?
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