It’s been ages since I’ve done a music-themed links page, but a bunch of little news items have popped up that are undeserving of full-article treatment.
Beth Akers, “How Income Share Agreements Could Play a Role in Higher Ed Financing,” The Brookings Institution, October 16, 2014.
When we last (and first) met Beth Akers she was trolling the student debt crisis, but now she’s doing some good advocacy with “income share agreements,” a novel term for what I’ve seen referred to as human capital contracts. It’s just replacing debt with equity for financing higher education, but it shifts the risk (and the rare windfall) away from the students. Unfortunately it hasn’t come up often in recent debates, aside from the University of Oregon’s decision to investigate using them. The fear was that human capital contracts would lead to an “adverse selection” problem as with health insurance: People in majors with the best job prospects will prefer to pay full tuition while those with the worst prospects will take the equity route, leaving the funders (the university in Oregon’s case) broke. Adverse selection is really a problem for universities that don’t sell lucrative degrees, so I’m not sure it’s really the problem at all.
Rashmi Rangan and James Angus, “Time for a state-sponsored law school in Delaware,” DelawareOnline.com, October 12, 2014.
Remember the University of Delaware’s scheme to build a public law school? Well, Rangan and Angus don’t. The idea was first floated in late 2010, but several months later the university’s feasibility study produced some bad news: The project would cost $100 million and the law school would run at a $165 million operating deficit for ten years. Nothing about the rising wages and job vacancies for attorneys in Delaware. I guess those folks didn’t have the nerve to predict an attorney shortage that would have to be remedied with foreign lawyers like Indiana Tech did.
Rangan’s and Angus’s arguments for a public law school boil down to (a) the population of two of its counties is growing and (b) the school’s graduates would go into public service. Again, nothing on unfilled attorney positions and rising wages. Delaware would probably get a lot more out of a $100 million expenditure by funding legal aid clinics throughout the state.
Dean Baker, “Quick Note on Heavy Babies and GDP Accounting,” Beat the Press, October 16, 2014.
Baker writes:
I have always thought that for purposes like constructing cost-of-living indexes, we are best off just pulling out the money we spend on health care and measuring the price increases of non-health care consumption against the income we have left over after paying for health care expenses. This would treat spending on health care like a tax. If we want to then incorporate changes in our health into our assessment of living standards then we look directly at outcome measures (e.g. life expectancy, morbidity rates, self-rated health conditions), not the volume of health services we are consuming.
We could say the same thing about higher education costs, mutatis mutandis, given that there’s no evidence it increases national income yet we’re told it’s crucially necessary for “competitiveness.”
Kate Lao Shaffner, “Five Questions With … Altoona Mayor Matt Pacifico on walking routes, property taxes, and downtown struggles,” NewsWorks.org, October 14, 2014.
Altoona is a rare example of a municipality that has chosen to take advantage of Pennsylvania’s split-rate property tax system to implement land value taxation. In a Q&A with the city’s mayor, Matt Pacifico, though, he seems to think it “didn’t work.”
I think when we decided to go 100 percent Land Value Tax, it missed the mark on what it was intended to do. It was supposed to motivate homeowners to want to improve their dwellings without seeing their property taxes go up from the city, but a lot of homeowners in the city are unaware of how it works. So I don’t think it was properly promoted. For instance, you could build a $3 million house on a two acre parcel of land, and you’re only taxed by the city on the value of the land, and not the structure on it. However, the school district and the county still tax you by the structure, so it can be very confusing. If those two taxing bodies were also able to tax based on LVT, then it could have the right effect, but they are not.
This is a pretty muddled statement. On the one hand, Pacifico acknowledges that the effects of LVT have been hampered by concurrent property tax systems the city has no control over that still tax structures, but on the other hand he seems to think that the primary point of LVT is to stimulate home remodeling. I’d hazard that people don’t think much about property taxes when adding patios to their dwellings but do think about them when building new structures from scratch.
Pacifico isn’t alone, for even Altoona’s city council is going to investigate the results of the tax shift. Superficially, however, I think Altoona’s LVT been more successful than Pacifico believes. A 2011 article in the Altoona Mirror described residents calling the city asking why their property taxes had fallen—and land speculators complaining about their bills. Most persuasively, a study of the final phase of Altoona’s tax shift found that most parcels would receive a tax cut while most would see a hike if it shifted back to a flat property tax. Generally, the switch to LVT decreased revenue from residential parcels while increasing it from commercial parcels. Consequently, on an in personam basis, the findings should be that LVT has cut taxes on the majority of middle- and lower-income households and raised them on land owned by the wealthy.
Nevertheless, I hope that the investigation explores the effects of LVT on the land use of commercial properties and absentee or vacant parcels. Here’s hoping the results are both good and clearly presented.
The Last Gen X American 