Comments on: Saving Taxpayers Money by Replacing High-Interest Loans at Tax Time with Instant Refunds

By: hillarygirl

hillarygirl — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:34:30 +0000

If Obama can’t make this one or the pennies happen, or for that matter get government employees staying in “green rooms,” I don’t know what he is going to do about anything else. those are so easy and I am not altogether sure that the pennies one even needs to go before Congress. Can you also make sure to keep the comments on point? The stuff about economists should be on a different blog.

By: madashelltaxpayer

madashelltaxpayer — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:08:52 +0000

Where do I sign up to get an instant refund gift card? This is the first smart thing I have heard in the area of taxes

By: uchicagoecon

uchicagoecon — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:22:52 +0000

we also spend a ton of time modeling stuff which already exists to explain current behaviors rather than propose new ones. I am rethinking economics as a career. I thought we would be solving problems like this one but this site really isn’t about economics — i don’t know what it’s about, doesn’t have a category. I am surprised you get economists posting to it

By: phdcandidate

phdcandidate — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:52:53 +0000

“friend” is right. I am expert in my own narrow area but have never taken the time to come up with new ideas. I don’t think anyone in ym department consistently comes up with new ideas like this one. They just study old ones and publish a lot of obscure stuff that no one reads. There is more good orignal thinking on this one site than in all of Harvard’s economics department. OK, an exaggeration but not by much.

By: friendoflittauergal

friendoflittauergal — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:43:44 +0000

my friend told me about this site and she is right. we do not get taught in economics to find solutions generally. we get taught to analyze other people’s solutions to see if and why they work. We also get taught a set of tools which can be used to idenitfy and address market breakdowns. But what we don’t get taught is where to look for the problems to solve. What I’ve learned from this site is to assume there are problems everywhere and solve them. This one is a perfect example. Or the one about the immigrants and the housing or the brokerage fees or the hotel rooms or the insurance rider for end of life care. No one wrote “this is a big problem” and waited for economists to solve them. They had to be identified as problems first. Our profession would be much more relevant if we could identify problems rather than wait for them to blow up and then try to understand how they happened and fix them. If economists were doing their jobs this site would not exist — these things would already be in economics articles or textbooks.

By: littauergal

littauergal — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:45:18 +0000

I think the reason people don’t post even though there is a million dollar prize is that it’s way harder to come up with these ideas than you think. I’ve had my eye on that prize for a month now and can’t come up with anything — even though I am a graduate student in economics — which hasn’t either already been thought of or would require a lot of work to prove the value of. Where do you and other posters get these ideas? I spend most of my time either studying, teaching, or doing original research into a topic. But the topics are so narrow that they would never change the world. The idea of ideas is actually pretty foreign to most economists, who prefer to evaluate things already in existence and debate how to change them.

By: alewis

alewis — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:09:36 +0000

that’s right about the arithmetic. Answer to your other question Amazingly I post most of the comments. Observations are: (1) This site is hard to time so only real policy wonks can find it; (2) I can tell by looking at the incoming email addresses that I get economists from greater Boston and economics majors from all over; (3) sometimes I get personal emails from people who are too shy to post public comments because the level of discourse seems so intelligent. Those private comments are usually more mundane but they are not publicly posted. But — and you know who you are — it is still OK to post publicly. It’s anonymous.

By: bceconomist

bceconomist — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:25:13 +0000

The way I do the math if a refund check takes three weeks to arrive the feds could offer 99% of it on the spot, earn roughly a 15% annual rate of return AND get modest economic stimulation. Adding the gift card would probably result in about a 105% refund on the spot. Another question — your comments are so intelligent for the most part. do you print them all or just some of them?

By: johngalen

johngalen — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:37:46 +0000

I am finding myself getting more and more upset as i read these things. These poistings seem so easy to do. Our incoming administration just wants to spend and spend but why aren’t they looking for solutions which dont’ require spending? Where are the Republcians when we need them? I feel like I don’t have any representation in the government. Everyone jsut wants to spend more than eveyrone else.

By: vivian

vivian — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:06:23 +0000

adamday just nailed it. This creates money for people and makes m oney for the government. why aren’t they already doing this? There must be a reason. I have a really hard time believing that the ideas on this site are new. there MUST be a reasom we arean’t already doing half of what’s on here.