What's with this libertarian tax incentive bullshit? All citizens are entitled to free education at whichever institution they can qualify for. Taxpayer pays the bill*. Done.
*And audits the universities like only the taxman can.
I'm thinking about very practical, immediate things like land use codes being revised right this minute.
Agree with 1. If you're wishing for stuff anyway, why not just wish for that?
I think your hypothesis is correct. Option 1 requires teh market to fix everything. But if teh market worked, subsidies wouldn't be needed.
1, 3: If you think conceding tax credits is bad, you're in for a real shock when you step outside this thread.
I think if you have an ability to influence land-use code and not an ability to pull a unicorn out of your ass, you should go ahead and do that you can do with the land-use code.
A few thoughts:
1) It might be worth including a 3rd category in the analysis (even though it doesn't apply to the real-life problems that you're dealing with) -- "Why not cash?" Should we have a bias towards replacing voucher systems with direct cash transfers?*
2) The argument in the OP makes sense, but I'd add two caveats. One problem with subsidizing industry is that those subsidies can be invisible and so vulnerable to industry capture -- with the standards gradually declining over time while the subsidies remain.
2a) Second, you can create a dynamic in which the combination of government regulation and subsidies can create a system which is difficult to change, and even difficult to understand, that works as long as shared assumptions remain shared. I am thinking, for example, of articles that I've read about the British railways. For example (emphasis mine)
Some of the railways' slump in profitability came about because their founders hadn't factored in the hefty costs they'd be liable for after ten or twenty years when their trains and track needed to be overhauled or replaced. But much came about as a result of the universal network effect. Once a network becomes essential to society as a whole, even when it is privately owned, political pressure builds to force the companies who run it to make it affordable for everyone, whether the private companies make money from the affordable services or not. As early as 1844, William Gladstone, then president of the Board of Trade, pushed through a law obliging all big new railway companies to run at least one affordable train each day to every station they served, in weatherproof carriages with seats. Up to that point third-class travel had been in open, low-sided wagons without seats, whatever the weather or time of day, sometimes mixing passengers and livestock. The companies prevaricated over the new rule, coming up with various permutations of the windowless box for transportation of the poor, but eventually they came round. 'It is hard to think,' Bradley writes, 'of any greater single improvement in travelling conditions imposed on unenthusiastic private enterprise by the government of the United Kingdom.'
Another aspect of the universal network effect is political pressure to make services safe. A factor in the 1844 Act was the first railway disaster three years earlier, when an early morning train from London to Bristol ran into the debris from a landslip in a deep cutting near Reading. Among the train's goods wagons were two third-class trucks whose passengers were huddled on plank seating, protected only by a two-foot rim around the edge. Some of the nine people who died were killed when they were thrown out on impact, others when the goods wagons rode up over them. Most were stoneworkers coming home for Christmas from work on the new Palace of Westminster.
,,,
The growing burden of regulation on the universal network that the first railway entrepreneurs had inadvertently built - to carry the poor, to be safe, to treat their workforce decently, to support other private businesses whether it suited them or not - spelled doom for easy profits. As the railways came into the 20th century it made less and less sense to see them as their founders had wanted them to be seen (as brilliantly opportunistic deployments of new technology that would make monopolies, take custom from carts, coaches and canal boats, arouse the envy of rivals and the admiration of all, create new business opportunities and make tons of money) or to see their owners as pro-market storytellers did (risk-takers, wealth-creators, noble warriors of greed who embraced competition as the samurai embraces bushido). Even before nationalisation in 1948, even before the advent of competition from motor transport, even before the government made the companies merge into four in 1923 - the London, Midland & Scottish, the London & North Eastern, the Southern and the Great Western railways - state and railways were in a state of symbiosis, where nominally private and nominally public bureaucrats were constantly obliged to mingle and find common ground.
I (and the author of the piece) think of that as a success story, but it's also easy to see how it can become a target for quote-unquote reformers wanting to reduce bureaucracy.
* My personal answer is, "probably not" but I think it's a good question.
I think the problem is that the soft budget constraint problem you describe is also possible under category 2, though I agree category 1 enables it more than any other option (when it's something people put a high intangible value on like education, health care, etc.). It even shows up under category 3 in the comments above, completely public education by governmental entities. But yes, the more the onus is on the big institutions to achieve desired outcomes, the better for the individual.
One other point of reference, another LRB article (the remarkable piece on British agricultural policy) gives another example of how the subsidies that you're talking about can work successfully.
In 1985, the government set up the Broads Grazing Marshes Conservation Scheme. The name was cumbersome, the location obscure, but it was the start of a new revolution in European agriculture. Up till then the only way governments had found to slow the rush to ever more intensive farming was to pay farmers compensation for not doing something they would otherwise have done. Farmers got subsidies for farming, or subsidies for not farming. This was different. Farmers who signed up to the scheme were given an extra subsidy on top of the old one for farming according to a detailed programme drawn up with wildlife experts. They were expected to limit the number of animals they grazed, cut hay no more than once a year and restrict pesticide use. For the first time, farmers were being paid by the state to do something other than maximise food output or slam on the brakes to stop over-production. They were being paid to be farmer-conservationists: a formalisation of a role farmers always thought they had anyway, that of stewards of the land.
I want the same deal the "Greatest Generation" got.
11 You need a depression followed by a world war for that but stick around a bit, looks like Trump's got both covered.
a role farmers always thought they had anyway, that of stewards of the land
Oh, please.
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The Soviet Union resembled a chocolate bar: it was creased with the furrowed lines of future division, as if for the convenience of its consumers.|>
(Nikolai Leonov, Chief Analyst of the KGB)
And sugar, if you count Cuba.
My preferred way is that states actually fund their state universities sufficiently (Utah is pretty good on this front), and people can pay for it by working part-time, or working summer jobs, or by taking a reasonable amount of loans (defined as what I took in subsidized Stafford loans in 1997.)
I realize given economic and political realities this is probably a pipe dream, but we used to manage this without anything terribly complicated.
12: Elaborate? Not disagreeing, but one sees people claim otherwise. Including Megan, IIRC.
Anyhow, the worry for your proposal for universities -- what's the tax incentive supposed to be on a non-profit entity funded in part by state taxes?
I realize given economic and political realities...
One of my hoped for silver linings of Trump winning (and to a lesser extent, the general insanity of the last 16 years) was that people would finally stop thinking political reality was some actually existing thing we had to obey. Why not just decide what you really want and say you want that?
Because I'm not willing to find a bunch of people too weak to fight back, scare monger about them for years, and denounce them until I get what I really want.
Probably there are means for major political change aside from racism and demagoguery...
16 is interesting as a rule of thumb for students not using school as a featherbed (tales from the 1960s) but not being wrung empty. Would the price be for everyone, or do rich families pay more?
21: Yes. They involve taking into account economic and political realities is my point.
20: no Bayesian vs frequentist Hundred Years' War?
Autocorrect capitalized the HYW for me after the phrase was done. That's a bit spooky.
I keep never meeting actual Bayesians doing work.
What's really creepy is it works for Fifty-Eight Years War.
That's a start on the demagoguery there, then.
I agree with 19.2. Trump is going to cause uncalcuable damage to the country, but if we survive him, it will completely upend any notions of what's politically possible.
Trump certainly will make different things possible.
18: I think there instead of tax breaks it becomes a condition of state funding.
11, 19 et seq.: respect Heebie's birthday wish, folks! This is the alternate timeline.
a role farmers always thought they had anyway, that of stewards of the land
Oh, please.
If you read the entire (long, and excellent) article it goes into detail on the tensions around that idea.
Oops, sorry Heebs, happy bday.
My preferred way is that states actually fund their state universities sufficiently
This is obviously ideal, but Ms. LBJ above is not able to exert influence in her state legislature in the immediate future.
Happy birthday. For my birthday, I want everyone in Canada to get a day off work.
In the Bright Timeline, President Sanders just issued an executive order expediting the visa process for refugees and ekranoplan engineers.
Another problem with vouchers, at least in my experience, is when they're effectively impossible to obtain (inadequate funding or discriminatory criteria) and/or impossible or dangerous to use (inadequate supply, poorly regulated, segregated, etc).
This is all probably obvious, but these issues really discouraged me when I was helping my mom look for subsidized housing in our home state many years ago. She qualified for Section 8, but the waitlist was several years long--it might have even been "temporarily" closed--and the housing was poorly maintained and clustered in high-crime neighborhoods, as one might expect. She managed to find a different county program that was better managed, in a safer community, and only had a two-year waitlist. They eventually accepted her, and it was fine for the period in which she could live independently, but we lived in fear of hurricanes and floods because the development was coastal, and if your apartment suffered too much damage you were forced to move out and placed back at the end of the waitlist.
The moral of the story is that you should try to avoid being poor and disabled in FL.
41 I was going to make a President Sanders joke but this is Heebie's Birthday Timeline (Happy Birthday Heebie) and she stipulated Hillary so President Hillary it is.
Keir! Did Heebie get hold of you by email?
OT: How old do kids have to be before you can have them make your coffee on Saturday morning and how long does it take them to get the strength right. Asking for a lazy friend.
IME quite young, and not long at all. And then they grow up into teenagers who sleep late on weekends, and the quality of service drops off a cliff.
Which means you should get to exploiting them fast, before they get surly.
45: Yep! I don't think I've sent a group email since Keir and I got in touch, but he knows he's on the schedule.
Yes. I was thinking if he's going to keep waking up at 6 to watch horrible cartoons, I may as well get something useful out of it.
And he's in a different time zone, so it'll be ready before you even wake up.
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The Agony of the Russian Idea (Princeton, 1996). The author universalizes the agony of the now impoverished intelligentsia. Eternally apocalyptic, the intelligentisa finally lived to see the day it helped topple a system that had provided immense subsidies for culture and shielded it from the exigencies of the mass market.|>