Video Games and Crime

This article (http://www.channel3000.com/technology/14916807/detail.html) tells about a lawmaker's idea to put a blanket tax on video games and gaming equipment in order to fund moving 17 year olds who commit a minor offense to juveniles court instead of adult court. Many people favor moving 17 year olds out of the adult court system for minor offenses, but are questioning the validity of the video game tax. I see several issues with the video game tax as well.

1) The video game tax applies to everyone. If a person is 25 and purchasing a video game, they have to pay. It d0es not distinguish between taxing violent video games and nonviolent ones. If I go to the store and pick up a copy of Tetris--my personal favorite, by the way--I am being taxed to put 17 year olds in the juvenile justice system. This does not affect me. I do not care if 17 year olds are being convicted in juvy or not for two reasons: one, I'm 18 and therefore an adult anyways, and two: I don't commit crimes. This change in the juvenile justice system has very little effect on many people who buy video games.

2) The tax implies that video games are the reasons why people commit crimes. If it only applied to violent video games, such as Halo, I would understand this tax a little more, even though I don't think there is a link between violent video games and violent crime. There's a link between violent people (who may or may not play violent video games) and violent crime. And violent crimes would be transfered to adult court anyway for a 17 year old, making that argument irrelevant.

3) The PPC. Let's oversimplify things and say that a 17 year old can be doing one of two things: committing misdemeanors or playing video games. For every hour that a person spends playing video games, guess what they're not doing? Committing misdemeanors. So if the goal was to reduce crime, shouldn't we just get all the kids video game systems and tell them to have fun? That, of course, would lead to other things, but that's called a trade-off.

This law does not even come close to providing a reasonable way to raise the funds to move all 17 year olds into the juvenile justice system. By taxing video gamers, we are simply implying that they are responsible for teen crime. This is not the case. The senator who wrote this law needs to get himself a copy of an econ textbook and take a look at it. Then, perhaps, he might be able to draft a law that would make more sense.

Maximizing Utility

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found today to be an excellent utility maximizing day. I slept until 9, took a catnap with my cat and am watching Grey's Anatomy with a friend tonight.
Hurrah for negative temperatures!