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I’d just like to point out that if you search for “electric clipper” on google images, there is a picture of me with a hole in my hair on the first page. Woohoo! But, if you add an ‘s’, I am lost in obscurity.

I would like to voice my support for retiring the US penny. It is a waste of time and metal. I have a jar containing virtually every penny that has passed through my hands for the last year, and it is not worth enough for me to drive to the grocery store and deal with the change counting machine. I’m certainly never going to count them myself, nor am I going to carry them around and spend them. I only save them in the jar because I can’t bring myself to throw away money. If your purchases are rounded to the nickel, would you ever even notice? For that matter, I could get behind retiring both the penny and the nickel at the same time. The dime is small enough to cover any cash transaction, and it is a nice even metric 1/10th of a dollar.

But the penny is a no brainer. It has outlived its usefulness. Sorry Abe.

As in Pigovian Taxes, of course. I’d like to throw the term around like I know what I’m talking about, but the truth is I just learned it and had to go to wikipedia to figure it out. It comes from Greg Mankiw’s post, The Pigou Club Manifesto. It’s almost two years old, but it’s new to me, so I thought I’d echo it again.  An argument for taxing gas consumption. He also has a more recent post about why the much more popular “windfall profits” tax on oil companies is NOT just as good.

I’d like to add road tolls as a much better way to pay for highway systems. They are paid for by taxes anyway, but the up front lump sum has no effect on people’s driving decisions; paying per trip would. It wouldn’t have to change revenue, but it could encourage more efficient use of roads, lower congestion, and those who used it more would pay more. With today’s high-speed toll lanes, it doesn’t even require a lot of toll booth lanes and extra delays to pay. Just drive through at 70, and the transponder on your windshield beeps to let you know you’ve just paid.  Plus, rates can be adjusted for areas of high congestion, or during peak times to spread the load.