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Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Book the revenue now
Cleversponge takes a good idea almost far enough. He urges everyone to help uber-wealthy Minnesotans develop crippling addictions to nicotine so that they die ASAP and improve state tax revenues.
This is, of course, very sound public policy. But it's not aggressive enough.
If it's not brand new, it's true: the only certain things in life are death and taxes. Rather than wait around for people to die, which they certainly will, or try to encourage the revenue process, we should book the revenue now. As governor, T-Paw has never met an accounting shift he didn't like. This is but one more subtle change in accounting methods which helps the bottom line.
Now, we could go half-hog on this like the social security actuaries used to do and project estate tax revenue over a responsible period of time, like, say, 75 years. Hog wash, I say. Let's go the whole 9 porcine yards and book future estate tax revenue over an infinite time horizon.
I've done the math. Over an infinite number of years, our future estate tax revenue is infinity. (I'm not an infitologist, but in all fairness, I think it should be mentioned that the revenue would be the weakest strength of infinity: equivalent to the number of doors in a hotel with an infinite number of floors, rather than as strong as the set of possible curved lines.) Let's book that future revenue now. We can fund education, reduce property taxes, build a new stadium for the Saints, implement tube-transport technology along Cedar Avenue, and have an infinite amount of money left over for the frivolous stuff...like making sure all Minnesota children have access to quality health care.
4 Comments:
Could you give us an executive summary of the hotel wikipedia article?
By 
, at
8:53 AM
Yeah. If you have a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all full, how many more people could you put up in your hotel? The answer is infinity.
Number of rooms=infinity
Number of peopel you can add to each room=0
0 x infinity=0
Am I missing something? Are people sleeping in the halls?
You've got an infinite number of rooms, so you take the person in room 1 and move him to room 2. Room 2 to room 3, etc. The paradox is that you can always move person from room X to room X+1, room X+1 is always full, but you can always move that person, too. And room 1 is now free.
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