Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Flat Tax

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 1/5/07, Vern Green <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> >
> > If it's so friggin' great, Vern, then why does a professor of econ at U
> > Michigan claim that *no* respectable economist will support the plan?  Do
> > you really think that they need a lesson from you?
>
> I doubt he needs a lesson from me, but the old saying "Those that can do,
> do, those that can't do, teach" comes to mine.

Awesome use of a classic logical fallacy there, Vern. Ignoring that,
please point out the important business executives or influential
politicians who support this or anything like it, and describe why
they think it is a good idea.

> If he was so good as an
> economist, then why is he toiling at a University making $150,000 a year? An
> economist of any merit could very well be making millions. If money means
> nothing to him, then why be an economist in the first place?

I don't think you understand academia or academics very well. For
Pete's sake, it could NEVER be just about the money, or nobody would
ever go to graduate school. I am dead certain that if I had computed
expected incomes for myself when I got out of school as an undergrad,
I would have found that that taking the path I chose has cost me many
millions of dollars over the course of my life. OK, just to make this
concrete before I quit. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale
University in 1985. My senior year and the summer after it, I had six
options as to what to do next.

1) Continue to implement the plan I had chosen and apply to graduate
school in cognitive psychology, because I loved the field and was
burning to contribute to our knowledge.

2) Apply to law school, where my undergraduate institution, really
high class rank, likely awesome board scores (I didn't take the LSAT
but you'll have to take my word for it that I do stompingly well on
standardized tests) and strong recommendation letters from professors
who were impressed with me as an undergraduate would have gotten me
into a top tier law school. By 1990, I could have been earning a ton
of money. Oddly enough, that course of action really didn't appeal to
me then.

3) Take a "starter job" at one of the many big consulting firms that
recruited (heavily) on campus and then do an MBA in two years or so.
This had no appeal to me either.

4) One of my best friends in school was closely related to a very
powerful politician. Getting a job in government would not likely have
been very difficult, and the idea had some appeal, but I felt uneasy
about doing something like this. Plus, it wasn't as appealing to me as
(1).

5) Get into a graduate school program in library science. Seriously, I
would have been a *formidable* librarian and there are definitely days
where I wish I had done this.

6) Take up another friend on an offer at the end of the summer to go
out with him in his van to the Bay area and try to use my 3l33t
PostScript (tm) and C language skills to get a job at Adobe or Apple
or somewhere out there. This sounded like fun, but I had student loans
to pay off and I wasn't sure I could quite make this work. Ironically
enough, this was probably the moment where I really blew my chance to
become a millionaire, because literally everybody who went out to SF
that summer did in fact hit the jackpot.

So I ended up doing (1). Actually, it wasn't that easy; I was very
picky about what school I wanted to get into, and ended up having to
spend a year as somebody's research assistant before I got into CMU.
On the bright side, that was the year I met the woman I married 20
years ago this year in August, and there is no question in my mind
that on the whole, I did the right thing. Still, there are days when
an extra $500K would really come in handy... But I went with my heart
and not so much with my head. I am sorry that you cannot understand a
decision like that. The professor of economics at Michigan probably
did much the same thing.

jking

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