Reddit reviews Macroeconomics, 3rd Edition

If you have the motivation and discipline to stick with it, working through a good Principles (introductory) textbook would probably be your best option. You can get used old editions off Amazon for about $10. I use Mankiw when I teach, but Krugman and other options are good too.

There are some decent free online courses out there:

• MR University
  
• Stanford
  
• MIT (This one is probably a bit much for most people to handle)
  
  If you want a mass-market book, start with The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run--or Ruin--an Economy. Even if you go the textbook option, it's probably worth supplementing with this one.

> I disagree. I think it would be beyond problematic and even more harmful to the economy.

Why? Our current system of payment effectively works based on gas consumption but is far less uniform due to the variance in fuel efficiency between vehicles.

I can't imagine a negative macro or micro impact from fixing this problem, if anything you are resolving an externality (more trucks on the road, trucks cause many deaths) which improves the market.

> On the topic of cities, that's where you have poor sections with no roads. Commutes would happen on dirt roads, which cannot stand that level of traffic.

I'm not sure you understand the way traffic moves through cities particularly in the 00's. Socioeconomic variance is vast in a very small area in urban centers and as such the roads low-income people drive on are the same as the roads the mid-income and high-income drive on. If the roads suck for the poor then they also suck for the rich.

> And yet bigger corporate conspiracies have happened.

Actually they haven't. What you are discussing is cornering the market which has been tried several times, unsuccessfully every time, over the last century. Without eminent domain to force a sale the first few sales would much up the market price of roads bringing other entrants in the market.

Beyond the historical example even the S/D model shows why this would be impossible, an attempt to corner a market will always raise the price increasing speculative activity.

You also seem to be approaching business as if everyone is a retarded version of Scrooge McDuck, businesses have no interest in eviscerating their own markets. A company that somehow managed to corner the NYC roads market would indeed kill the city, they would walk away with some profits but a fraction of what they could have earned had they kept the rates at a reasonable level long term.

Even in markets that are regulatory monopolies (cable etc) we certainly see price and service inefficiencies but if business was as shortsighted as you claim why doesn't Comcast just charge everyone $1k a month for a 500k internet service?

> For 5x my salary each year, I'd be happy to close my road.

You are presuming that anyone would actually pay the fee you asked. A toll jumping from $1 to $100 overnight would not result in you earning millions, it would result in you earning nothing. You might want to go read up on price elasticity buddy.

> Not to mention, it would kill my local economy, which would significantly increase the value of my dollar.

Unless you are living in 1917 no it wouldn't. That's not how currency value behaves in a fiat currency.

Tl;DR: Read something like this

Textbooks are your best bet, for pretty much any subject, once you're past the layman's understanding. Just look up what textbooks they are using for Econ 101/102 in a solid University, then find a used copy.

When I was tutoring 101/102, the course used Krugman's Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, which were decent. It was interesting getting the introductory perspective from a prominent, Nobel Prize winning economist.

> This is classic supply side economics

No its not.

> The largest driver of the deficit since 2008 was not the mortgage crisis, it was the Bush Tax cuts

o_O CBO estimates the combined loss in revenue of EGTRRA & JGTRRA at $1.1t. At peak (2007) lost revenue was $120b. Do you math?

> Tax cuts -- particularly tax cuts for the wealthy -- are a horrible way to attempt to stimulate the economy.

Read this and this. Then go read about this which is what causes this effect to occur which in turn means models like this emerge. I never stated anything about tax cuts for the wealthy, nice strawman, but positing that tax cuts don't have a positive effect on growth is simply empirically nonsense (Note how I am citing real sources?).

Your reference to "supply side economics" to refer to something you clearly don't understand when I was referring to something which is part of mainstream economics rather then heterodox nonsense like supply-side BS leads me to believe you don't have a particularly good grasp of economics.

> My turn to say "irrelevant." I don't even know that it is true, but it's pretty much beside the point.

The purpose of taxation is to raise revenue to support spending not to simply raise revenue for no purpose. With a balanced budget over the business cycle effective tax rates can fall long term while supporting precisely the same level of spending. That is called growth.

Rather then understanding economics from places like /r/politics, HuffPost and Alternet pick up a textbook. This and this are both extremely good.