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To: Windy City Conservative
The rest of the Reuters squib is not particularly revealing:

"If the government sells something and gets revenue from it, that's revenue. If there is a user fee of some kind and we want to raise that to keep up with the times, that's revenue. And if you add up all of the revenues that we Republicans have agreed to, it's between $150 billion and $200 billion," Kyl said on the Senate floor.

The first point - sales receipts are revenue - isn't even hard enough to be in Accounting 101; the second point - raising user fees to keep up with the times - is too nebulous to really be meaningful.

It would make sense, for example, if - and this is just a hypothetical - the entrance fees to national parks had been set at $20 back in 1980 and never adjusted for inflation. If $20 was the market value of the right to enter and enjoy a national park, then that value, as measured in depreciating dollars, should have been indexed for inflation. Indexing that $20 in 1980 dollars to find the equivalent amount in 2011 dollars yields an amount of about $52.

Thus, in this case, it would make perfect sense to raise the entrance fee from $20 to $52 - unless there were good evidence that the intrinsic market value of the entrance right has fallen relative to other goods - i.e., people value it less than they did in 1980 - in which case the increase in that entrance fee would be less than $52. Conversely, it might be economically rational to raise it more than to $52 if the evidence suggested that people value that entrance right more today than they did in 1980 (which isn't so far-fetched considering how widespread the green cult is today).

That is precisely what a private business would do, and there is nothing intrinsically objectionable about the government doing the same thing, given that we've all essentially agreed to the concept of entrance fees on national parks in the first place.
19 posted on 07/06/2011 3:42:47 PM PDT by Oceander (The phrase "good enough for government work" is not meant as a compliment)
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To: Oceander

Back door tax increase w/o any fundmental Medicare reform?

Paging Governor Palin....


24 posted on 07/06/2011 3:45:19 PM PDT by section9
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