[throwawayjava]

> But the truth is that taking money out of revenue collection is the exact same thing as writing a check.

Pot, meet kettle. If this is the case, and if it's true that there's lots of "Rube Golderbian" infrastructure at play, why not implemented this policy -- in the short term with a long-term phase out -- as a direct budget cut to the NSF? As opposed to a 20% tax hike on people making 30k? The end effect on the national budget would be the same, without introducing lots a huge budgetary refactoring project.

> a) Change the absurd "we charge you tuition and then waive it" system.

But as a software person (?), you must understand that "ok make this big change to this complex system" isn't always a reasonable request given a 1 year timeframe.

In particular, I'm going to go out on a limb and conjecture that your edit is probably the only thing people actually care about. Everything else is missing the forest for the trees.

[darawk]

> Pot, meet kettle. If this is the case, and if it's true that there's lots of "Rube Golderbian" infrastructure at play, why not implemented this policy -- in the short term with a long-term phase out -- as a direct budget cut to the NSF? As opposed to a 20% tax hike on people making 30k? The end effect on the national budget would be the same, without introducing lots a huge budgetary refactoring project.

Because I don't think we should increase taxes on people making 30k 20%. I think we should eliminate cruft from the tax code. This is cruft.

> But as a software person (?), you must understand that "ok make this big change to this complex system" isn't always a reasonable request given a 1 year timeframe. > In particular, I'm going to go out on a limb and conjecture that your edit is probably the only thing people actually care about. Everything else is missing the forest for the trees.

Sure, it's certainly possible that making the change immediately is the wrong move. I'm not sure I see the evidence for that in this particular case, but yes, sometimes that is so.

When thinking about tax policy, it's important to consider now how something makes you feel, and not the first-order consequences of the change, but the equilibrium consequences of the change. If you eliminate this loophole would grad students actually pay more? I very much doubt it. The university would find a way to equalize the price, either by modifying the silly tuition policy (a simple fix is make tuition $1 and then waive that), paying it for you, or by some other means.

My guess is that the change will also have no net effect on revenue collection, which makes it fairly worthless from the perspective of its authors, who are trying to justify tax cuts in other areas. But I still think it's a good idea, because anything that eliminates cruft from the tax code is a good idea, provided it doesn't cause undue harm elsewhere, which I think it is highly unlikely to in this case.