All of akorinek's Comments + Replies
I think it's a pretty plausible scenario but not the only one - there's quite a range of possibilities - let me recommend a survey paper with Phil Trammell that is closely related.
Two additional things you may find interesting to consider:
- Given the size of our national debt, taxes are quite likely to go up in the next few years, implying that you'll get more of a tax break for a charitable donation in a few years than you get now.
- On the other hand, taxes are not entirely "money lost" - a good part of government spending goes into causes that you may not be entirely averse to - although it's hard to tell what a marginal dollar will do, e.g. whether it will be used to cut the taxes of millionaires, or to provide social benefits to the poor.
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2y
To your point on marginal impact - governments certainly don't spend money they take in dollar for dollar, and in fact it seems the correlation between intake and expenditure is quite far from 1:1. US government debt is on the order of trillions of dollars, so while its maybe slightly better than flushing your money down the toilet, I'm not sure I'd value it much higher
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2y
Those are both great considerations! Thanks for the response.
I'd suggest to just try it out. Coursera allows you to reset your timeline if you go slower than the suggested schedule so it's no problem to spread out the material over a longer time range, and I hope you'll still find it informative.