In this case, the concepts would likely overlap.

Taxing large endowments would cause wealthy universities to slash financial aid and charge more tuition. Harvard doesn't even charge tuition if your family is middle class (less than ~$125 income) or lower because it has a huge endowment and can afford those kind of things. For profits have no endowment and charge almost everyone full freight. Hardly the desired result. Most of the really bad universities out there (the ones that don't get graduates jobs) don't have huge endowments.

A transfer to another type of debt for the sole purpose of declaring bankrupcty would likely count. You might be OK if you made every effort to pay before defaulting.

Navient is just a servicer now. It's now mostly the government that enjoys these protections. The Student loan business has essentially become a government monopoly. At least on paper, the government actually makes money off student loans.

Look up the term "fraudulent transfer" as relates to the bankruptcy laws.

Those provisions are not entitlements (the term "entitlement" refers to direct payments the government has bound itself to make, such as social security benefits), and some of them aren't really aren't even tax breaks. For example, Oil and Gas development expensing (known as IDC expensing) was created in part in reaction to the specific economics of drilling for oil. Arguably, it simply creates a more accurate reflection of income.

Plenty of shady shops will be happy to forge one for you.

Too easy to evade. Just by tires online from out of state.

I'm not in favor of any program that requires me to install something in my car.

Many states already address this with separate taxes for diesel fuel. In any event, I have much less of a problem with a per-mile tax applied to commercial vehicles.

My point is: increasing the tax is not politically possible, but installing a completely NEW tax that requires tracking your every movement is politically possible?

We are at least a decade away from the point where EVs make up a large enough share to be a serious threat to revenue. In the meantime, we want to encourage EV use. Most states are subsidizing them already.

The gas tax works. It's hard to evade and benefits from existing taxing infrastructure. The only problem is that it was never indexed for inflation. Tell me why we need a completely new system? Are people really less resistant to this than paying a few more cents a gallon at the pump?

Electric vehicles and hybrids can't be the reason. Electric vehicles still represent a tiny portion of vehicles on the road. Hybrids don't really get much better fuel economy than the tiny econoboxes of the 90s. People still drive big trucks everywhere. Since less fuel efficient vehicles also tend to be heavier, they cause a disproportionate amount of road damage (and effectively get taxed more per mile).

The big difference is that the auto industry is extremely capital intensive compared to the software industry. You can't start a car company out of a garage like you could a computer company. Even Tesla (with all of Musk's cash backstopping it) almost went bankrupt trying to get off the ground. For this reason, established players have a massive advantage. The more likely scenario is not that Automakers will lose their position as automakers, but that they will be forced to purchase automation equipment from tech companies. But automakers have always used third-party component suppliers- so this would really not be a huge change for them.

Yeah, and most garbage dumps also probably have gems in them somewhere, but you don't see me rifling through them.

Voice acting is still acting. You can pretend to be someone else (it's a lot more convincing with characters who mostly say things like "what's up doc?"), but you can never copy someone's acting performance perfectly. If a substitute were equally as good, they wouldn't have offered $14 million to keep the original. Fox isn't a charity.