"Certain economists, though, have another way of looking at that and similar findings. They see a systematic psychological breakdown — as a species we're just really bad at understanding costs that come later on. Instead, we assign a disproportionate amount of importance to what's immediate and tangible."
Incidentally, the government is also pretty good at misleeading the public about how much its services cost. One of the big benefits of the sales tax, from the governments viewpoint, is that it is so easy to pay that consumers often forget how much of the purschae price is actually for the product and how much goes to the government.
