The city of Pittsburgh is expected to give preliminary approval today to a one-percent tax on college tuition, intended to help pay for city workers’ pensions. Karl Smith, an Assistant Professor of Public Economics and Government at the University of North Carolina, says it would be difficult to design a worse tax structure than this — difficult, but perhaps not impossible. And he has some ideas for what they might try next.

Taxing education is a little indirect, he says. Why not impose a direct tax on literacy, using the money to subsidize illiteracy? Or tax good parenting to fund child abuse? My favorite suggestion, though, is his last — he proposes that Pittsburgh impose a recycling tax and use the revenue to fund “pouring motor oil into bodies of water.”