10%.

• Chance he runs for vice president and wins, with the presidential candidate resigning promptly: 5%
• Chance he cancels or significantly delays election: 3%
• Chance he successfully refuses to leave office after election using force: 2%

Here are all the ways that doesn’t happen:

• Chance he dies of natural causes: 70% - it’s about one in three per year for a man in his early 80s, which would give us 1-0.66^4 = 81% for four years, but he has access to the best possible medical care
• Chance he runs for vice president and wins, with the presidential candidate promising to resign promptly, and is betrayed: 10%
• Chance he attempts to cancel or delay the election and fails: 10%
• Chance he refuses to leave office after election and is removed: 10%

These things have a less than 1% chance:

• Constitutional amendment
• Supreme court allows him to run for a third term in violation of the unambiguous text of the constitution

I didn’t really have a high school bully, but I did have an elementary school bully. I knew he would end up in prison when we were both five years old.

He did, for manslaughter, at 19.

A failure to set an excise tax on a product or service that offsets its externalities is not a subsidy. A lower tax rate than a competing product is arguably a subsidy.

I’m not aware of any modern societies that make a credible attempt to adjust the price of all or most goods and services to include their externalities. That sounds like a good idea in theory, but very difficult to implement in practice.

Fuel, and other car-related taxes (sometimes based on horsepower or engine displacement) in most countries in Europe were much higher than in the USA long before there was widespread concern about the environmental impact of cars.

That’s probably not true, but hard to calculate.

The previous time I looked, which was a while ago, federal fuel tax revenue in the USA and federal highway expenditures were about equal. Since then, fuel tax revenue has fallen behind highway spending; the required increase to even it out would be modest in absolute terms - something like 15 cents per gallon. States each have their own taxes and budgets, of course.

As for the road damage each car causes, it increases (roughly) proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight. Semi trucks and similar heavy commercial vehicles cause almost all of the traffic-induced road wear, and passenger cars contribute very little. It’s likely the fuel taxes paid for a passenger car (even a relatively large one) are several times its marginal impact on road maintenance.

The commodity price for gasoline right now looks to be about 2 USD per gallon. Retail gasoline in the USA is at least a dollar more due to taxes and markup.

Subsidies may play a role as well, but the taxes in some countries are extreme by American standards. My take on it is that a fuel tax is effectively neutral if it brings in enough revenue to pay for the road system.

Can you think of anything that happened in the past month or so, perhaps involving US politics, that might have a tendency to radicalize people?