Readit NewsThis is so silly.
Who's going to build these hypothetical housing units? So many that there are more houses than applicants.
1. Bad tenants will have no incentive not to harm the property and the neighborhood.
2. Landlords will be forced to pay for insurance to cover all the bad things that tenants are now free to do.
3. Rents will rise to cover the costs of the insurance. Conscientious tenants will be penalized.
4. Even otherwise conscientious tenants will start to cut corners since they are having to pay for the insurance anyway and it’s clearly unfair.
What a nasty situation for conscientious tenants landlords and neighbors you are advocating.
Only the least conscientious people win.
>1. Bad tenants will have no incentive not to harm the property and the neighborhood.
Of course they will: they may lose the security deposit, may be evicted, may be sued, and may even be arrested.
>2. Landlords will be forced to pay for insurance to cover all the bad things that tenants are now free to do.
They already pay for insurance.
>3. Rents will rise to cover the costs of the insurance. Conscientious tenants will be penalized.
Building more housing will make housing more expensive?
>4. Even otherwise conscientious tenants will start to cut corners since they are having to pay for the insurance anyway and it’s clearly unfair.
No, for the same reasons I gave before they still have an incentive to behave well.
Even their driver assistance features work worse than the competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
For this plan to work, people have to really hate paying taxes. So, despite the fact that Norquist and his allies often talk about things like "reducing the burden on the taypayer", they have in fact acted to make paying taxes as unpleasant an experience as possible. This means deliberately underfunding the IRS and ensuring filing taxes is slow, complicated, and expensive.
He is also the architect of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which is endorsed by the vast majority of Republican politicians currently in office. The pledge prohibits them from supporting any legislation that would increase taxes on people or corporations. The idea of "starving the beast" has been endorsed in as many words by a number of politicians, including George W. Bush.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpa...
Any time a Republican politician starts talking about reducing the deficit, know that they are lying. Over 95% of them have publicly signed a pledge meant to deliberately increase the deficit. This isn't a conspiracy theory. The plans are public.
It is, at its core, a fear that testing largely reproduces the status quo. If one accepts the idea that there is an intellectual elite who constitute the highest strata of society, and that their gifts are innate and heritable rather than trained, it follows that social mobility is pretty much dead. It is a bleak vision.
Personally I think there are different problems that are much bigger and woollier which keep people from non-elite backgrounds down, regardless of test outcomes. The structure of the education sector and employment more widely. Expectations about life and the distribution of rewards etc. We rarely have good quality, nonpartisan discussions about these things which I think pushes people to take views which are instrumental rather than informed.
I have always found the idea of social mobility depressing. It assumes that we will always have a hierarchy, with some people who are powerful and prestigious and others who are poor and always feel inadequate. It assumes that we will always have an underclass but at least people can leave it.
To be fair, I don't think the debate was ever about the quality or predictive value of the tests. There is a small, but well-organized and vocal subset of the population that hates the idea of excellence and differentiation. They want, and have been quite successful in, the replacement of standards of excellence with vaguely defined (defined by them, of course) buzzwords like "equity" and "diversity".
The arguments against these tests are, of course, awful. Objective tests are the best way we know of to remove human bias. Aptitude tests (basically IQ tests) are the best way we know of to measure someone's natural ability (determined in early childhood) with little influence from their experience. Since their arguments make so little sense, it is reasonable to wonder about the psychology of opponents of standardized testing. But their arguments are, at least on the surface, about predictive value.
That being said, they seem to have backed up their numbers, and MIT knows how to count, so they must be right! I just always hoped SAT/ACTs weren't that conclusive so that we didn't have to go through them anymore and could focus on the funner AP/A Level stuff :)
That isn't what they said. They said that access to those tests is not universal. Students from high schools that don't offer AP classes would have a hard time taking AP exams. This would exclude people from rural or impoverished areas.
This is why the SAT and ACT are useful: they are meant to be aptitude tests. They are IQ tests in disguise. If properly designed, they will measure intelligence with minimal influence from education or cultural background. Theoretically something like these tests could be administered to elementary school students and still be useful for predicting success in college a decade later.
Besides, I don't see that they're doing solid work. It would be solid work if they ditched pure vision and moved to a system that works. Instead they are putting in heroic efforts on a dead-end technology. That is impressive in the same way that getting Doom running on a TI-84 would be impressive.
Sources would be nice.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
His stated reasons are so fantastically stupid that I can't imagine them being legitimate. Return-free filing is the best tool we have to achieve his claimed goals of reducing the complexity and confusion of tax season. Can you think of an innocent explanation for his opposition?