Google Project 10^100 Reaches Voting Phase 154
An anonymous reader writes "In autumn last year, Google announced Project 10 to the 100, through which it aimed to commit $10 million to implement the best philanthropic idea. The project was suspended indefinitely after receiving more than 150,000 submissions. Google has now announced sixteen finalists — each of which was inspired by many individual submissions — and issued a call for votes. The voting deadline is October 8 and the Project 10^100 advisory board will then select up to five ideas to be implemented."
Re:Looks like a phishing site. (Score:2, Informative)
It's Google's site.
See the announcement here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/announcing-project-10100-idea-themes.html/ [blogspot.com]
If you're suspicious that that might not be Google's official blog: they own blogger.com and blogspot.com and can reasonably be expected to not let anyone get away with impersonating them on their own sites.
Re:Transportation promising, Tax option too politi (Score:3, Informative)
Sales taxes (and other consumption taxes) are regressive taxes. However, not all policies involving sales taxes are regressive. The simplest (perhaps not the best...) example of such is the FairTax [fairtax.org] proposal. It uses a combination of a flat sales tax rate with a constant dollar rebate to each consumer. The combination means that with increasing spending, a larger net fraction of your spending is on taxes. That is, it's a progressive sales tax.
Of course, the Google proposal also talks about various incentive taxes. Whether these are good or bad seems to depend mostly on whether you're calling them sin taxes or a way to internalize externalities [wikipedia.org] so that the market can actually optimize overall wealth. Markets optimize locally; external costs of production that are borne by people other than the producers (like pollution) will be undervalued in the optimization process. Transferring those costs back onto the producer through taxes internalizes that externality and lets the market optimize the thing it should actually be optimizing.
A tax system that was actually based on setting goals, and then looking at data and evidence about what tax systems would actually achieve those goals, would be perhaps the biggest advance in government technology in centuries. Of course, it's also spectacularly idealistic and difficult to make work. But then, so are all the other ideas they list, so...
(I haven't actually decided which to cast my vote for yet, but the taxes proposal is on the short list.)