Among the 15 ideas the magazine’s latest issue offers as “modest proposals for making the world a better place,” a couple particularly caught my eye.
George “College is oversold” Leef will be interested to read Thomas Toch’s suggestion: “Tell the truth about colleges.”
The conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for ? that the larger the price tag, the better the product. But that’s not true in higher education. Tuition has been skyrocketing for years, with little evidence that education has improved. Universities typically favor research and publishing over teaching. And influential college rankings like the one published by U.S. News & World Report measure mostly wealth and status (alumni giving rates, school reputation, incoming students’ SAT scores); they reveal next to nothing about what students learn.
Meanwhile, Roy “Reform the tax code” Cordato would likely agree with Megan McArdle’s prescription: “End the corporate income tax.”
The corporate income tax may be the stupidest tax we have. At 35 percent, America’s levy on corporate income is one of the highest in the developed world. In 2007, about 2.5 million companies prepared lengthy returns at great expense, yet the tax generated only about 15 percent of total federal tax revenue. The tax on corporate profits discourages capital formation, targets shareholders regardless of their wealth, and fuels frantic, and costly, business efforts to dodge it.
