* supply is not inelastic, especially in Education
So, you can point to Universities that increased dramatically in size (of the student body, not administratively) as a result of the availability of this student loan program? No?
Yes the prices would go down, but not even nearly enough to let the truly poor students enroll. So what do you do about them?
As I recall, Louisiana has it set up so that if you get good enough grades in High School (basically, honor-roll level), then you get to go to any of the State Universities tuition-free for a year. If you do well in University that year, then the next year is also tuition-free.
Seems to work out pretty well for us.
And note that this is a STATE program, which is where education spending should be done, not at the Federal level.
A better resolution is approval voting. Given any number candidates, vote yea or nay on each candidate. Candidate with the most votes wins. Everyone would cast one yea for one of the 2 major parties at least at first, but are free to vote for any third party they wish, without costing them their vote for a major candidate.
Probably.
But that would probably require a Constitutional Amendment to make it work, because sure as shooting, the Reps and Dems would fight to keep any State from passing such a thing into law.
a vote for anything other than the major party you are closest to is a vote for the one you are not.
Only because fools like you have been led to believe that by the corporate owned media when the corporates own both Republicans and Democrats. A vote for a Greenie or a Libbie is a vote against the status quo, a vote against the corporates (well, maybe not a vote for the libbies...)
No, because it's generally true. If I favor the Reps (I don't), and vote Libertarian because they're closer to what I really want, then the Reps lose a vote.
Which means that the Dems now need one fewer vote to win the election.
Ditto if I favor the Dems (I don't) and vote Green.
Also, it should be noted that Libertarians are NOT "pro-corporation", since a corporation is a government-created entity (didn't know that, did you?), with certain legal advantages that would not be available under a purely Libertarian model.
As to your strawman: "someone you know robs banks. a vote for a Republican or Democrat is a vote to imprison your loved ones"...yep. Sure is.
Note that you won't get mj legalized by whining that you should be allowed to use it. You'll get it legalised once you convince your congresscritters that:
(a) most people want it legalized
(b) there's a lot of tax money to be made on mj
(c) it'll get them reelected when they otherwise wouldn't be.
Note that right now, most people don't really care enough one way or another about legalizing mj to make it worth the bother of legalizing it.
Note further that, if Prohibition is any guide, the people selling mj illegally are bribing pols to keep it that way.
Note, finally, that few enough incumbents are unseated in any given election that there is no chance that you'll ever get enough pols to vote it legal just to get reelected...
The only way you won't collect Social Security or Medicare is if you don't live long enough or you keep electing guys who want it to go away.
Don't bet too much on this. Currently, SS/Medicare amounts to a 14.4% tax on everyone working. We currently have about three taxpayers paying into the system to support every person taking money from the system.
If current demographic trends continue (life expectancy continues to increase, number of children per family continues to decline), we'll hit two workers per beneficiary in my lifetime (and I have cancer, and don't expect to reach "average life expectancy").
Which will require, as a minimum, an increase fro 14.4% to 21.6% just to fund social security and medicare, assuming that costs on both programs track with inflation (and they haven't on Medicare, ever).
So, you ready for a poor man paying combined federal/state/local taxes at a 50% rate? It'll be at least that bad before most of you die, and it'll continue to get worse after that - your grandchildren are each going to have to pay enough social security taxes to support ONE retiree each....
Of course, we could always do deficit spending to avoid the tax increases. Then, by and by, we'll be Greece....
This political behavior to actively try and get blocked by the other party obviously works best in a two-party system. So your hope for real change comes with a third party, not with the republocrats/demicans.
Nonsense!
Only a true moron would be incapable of writing a bill accomplishing some good thing in such a way as to offend both other Parties if we had a third Party to offend.
The Parliamentary system tends to preclude this sort of thing, since the Government theoretically has an automatic majority vote in the legislature and can get whatever they want passed.
Note that "theoretically" isn't always the same as practice, what with coalition governments and that sort of thing. But it mostly works that way, as long as the Government lasts.
Note also that the word "government" means something different in Europe than it does here....
No one said that the Democrats are pushing for students to go to four-year colleges. They want to allow students to receive the financial aid to do so, and they want to prevent the predatory for-profit schools from abusing the system.
It should be noted that the Republicans feel exactly the same way.
It should also be noted that when the Republican House passed a measure last week to extend that interest rate, the President immmediately threatened a veto.
When all is said and done, the argument isn't about the student loan interest rate (everyone in Congress agrees it should be maintained as is), but about how to fund the loan program when it requires borrowing money at market rates and lending it out at below market rates.
The Dems picked this particular funding method not because they preferred it, but because they were pretty sure the Reps would oppose it. Just as the Reps in the House picked their funding method because they were pretty sure the Dems would oppose it.
Thus, both sides can say truthfully, that they TRIED to do this, but were stymied by [EVIL OTHER PARTY]...
Our society currently values a college education. How many companies are going to hire you if you only have a high school diploma?
Relevant to this...
Once upon a time, when you wanted a job with a company, they would give you an aptitude test, to determine whether you knew enough to do the job, or were bright enough to learn to do the job well.
Then, along came someone who argued that those aptitude tests were discriminatoy.
So, it became illegal to use aptitude tests for hiring purposes.
At that point, the companies changed policies to require a High School diploma, reasoning that getting the HS diploma showed, at least, that you were bright enough to learn to do the job.
Later, as new policies like "social promotion" gained popularity, HS diplomas became increasingly poor indicators of learning ability.
So now, many jobs require a Bachelor's Degree to get. Following the reasoning that a BA/BS shows you are at least bright enough to learn to do the job.
Alas, more and more people are getting through college without ever having had to learn to think well (or even having had to think).
You can, perhaps, predict where this is heading....
Protestants witch trials were closer to Monty Python. Some were mob lynching. Other towns hired witch hunters â" who were paid for each witch they found (and guess how may they found?).
Alas,no.
Yes, some were mob lynchings. Which were illegal even then.
And yes, witch hunters were hired to do the work of locating witches. And like the Inquisition (which paid people a bounty for turning witches in), they never lacked for witches to investigate.
However (there's always a however), witch "trials" involved a judge. And they weren't run like Monty Python. Nor did judges just take the word of the witch hunters...
As I said, you generally had to get a confession. And torture was the preferred technique for extracting confessions (there have even been times and places where it was assumed that even a voluntary "confession" was unacceptable without verification by torture).
Note, by the by, that Friedrich von Spee (the guy who finally convinced the Church that torture didn't guarantee truth) was a witch hunter once upon a time, for those interested in the history of such things...
I just got a vision of seventeenth century witch trials, where a woman was tied up and weighted down with a stone, then thrown in the river. If she floated, she was a witch and burned. If she sank, she was not a witch (but likely drowned by the time she was fished out).
I think your view of 17th century witch trials has been distorted by too much Monty Python.
Witchcraft Trials in the 17th Century were generally run by the Inquisition, and pretty much required a confession for a conviction.
Hence the use of torture to extract a confession. After all, everyone knows that noone would lie under torture.
And yes, this was a common belief then. It lost a bit of appeal after Friedrich von Spee wrote his book on the subject, and provided good, logical arguments as to why torture didn't guarantee truth....
I agree with the other respondents - all the seats were sold.
I went to the earliest showing of the day, got there within ten minutes of the theatre actually opening, picked the format I expected the fewest other people to want to watch, and still had a bitch of a time finding three seats together for myself, wife, and daughter.
And there were NO empty seats when the show actually started.
You have three alternatives for seeing the Avengers in the near future:
$15 - watch it in crowded theaters at high def, pay gobs more for concessions
$0 - watch it at home at low def in your underwear with your own snacks
$0 - don't watch it (or wait until it comes out on DVD and watch it as often as you want for the price of a single theater viewing)
There is obvously a fourth option, since I bought three tickets for the show this past Saturday morning for $15 TOTAL, not apiece.
How can I afford all this? Well, the most recent upgrade cost ~AUD$23K, and was subsidised 50%, so we only paid about AUD$11K.
So, basically you can afford it by getting your neighbors to pay for half of it?
The only problem with subsidies is that they only work if only a few people take advantage of them. If everyone decides it's a great idea, then they pay for half of your system, and you pay for half of their system, and you all end up paying full price.
Note, by the way, that I don't disapprove of you taking advantage of the subsidy - you should take EVERY benefit available to you, as long as you're paying taxes to the government.
That said, I do think that subsidies are designed primarily to siphon money from the taxpayers to unprofitable businesses, and are really a bad idea.
The first would be to repeal the obamanation of a health care bill previously passed, and just extend the minimum age of medicare to zero
A variant of this has always been my preferred answer to the "healthcare crisis" (actually a "health insurance crisis") - reduce age of Medicare eligibility by three years every year, and make everyone under age 19 automatically eligible for Medicaid.
That would provide decent healthcare to all children, and make the transition to everyone using Medicare over a long enough period that the economy would have time to adjust to the change.
Just as a related question - why don't we see nuclear power on other vessels, for instance long distance tankers? It would seem ideal for long cruises and save tons on fuel weight.
USS Savannah. She was built in the '60s, I believe, as a nuclear powered merchant ship. She's still on display as a museum ship somewhere on the East Coast, I believe.
Alas, fuel oil was cheap, so she was never profitable enough to make it worth the bother of repeating the design.
Nautilus breaking through the ice at the north pole, proving the viability of nuclear submarines and, at the same time, doing something that had never been done.
Nautilus didn't break through the ice at the North Pole. It sailed under ice the whole way over the North Pole.
Skate was the first to surface at the Pole, I'm pretty sure. Least, that's what they told us at Sub School.
I find it shocking that 300 people accepted her friend requests without so much as raising an eyebrow.
Probably not so obvious as all that. I expect that after the first half dozen or so had accepted her friend requests, after that everyone knew she was a friend of [someone they already knew]...
For example my old car attracted a Road Tax of ã145, the new one only pays ã35 because it is more efficient (and still pretty quick). Okay, if I had bought a 4 litre off-roader it would have gone up, but pollution and extra weight causing wear on the roads does cost money so it seems reasonable that owners of such vehicles pay their fair share.
And in the USA, we do exactly the same thing via gasoline taxes.
If some of these "civilization"-y-things like local Fire department were allowed to be created spontaneously, at least they would be accountable to me. At least I would have the right to opt out if they start to use my dues to fund a war.
Of course, you don't pay Federal taxes for the Fire Department. Fire Departments come under State and/or Local taxes (depending on where you are).
As I understand it, prior to a certain time, the US govt. did just fine with no taxes. It generated its revenue from import duties, and with this limited revenue, it stuck to limited things like enforcing law.
That was true pretty much up to the time when politicians figured out they could bribe voters with their own money. After that, it just became a matter of figuring out new ways to bribe the voters every election cycle....
The fortified cockpit door doesn't help if the pilot or copilot employed by the airline is the terrorist. He kills the other occupant of the cockpit, if necessary, and flies the plane into the target. The passengers, even if they realize what's going on, can't do anything about it because they're locked out of the cockpit.
The TSA doesn't deal with that eventuality either, so we can dispense with the TSA, and not measurably increase our risk...
The rules also state that teachers have no expectation of privacy online, and that principals and other officials will inspect teachers' profiles.
How does this square with the federal legislation wending its way through the system that would prevent employers from looking at social networking data of employees?
Well, historically, a lot of legislation of this sort has had an exception for government employees.
Which, if it's not obvious, public school teachers are....
The missiles are aimed at something. There won't be time to re-aim them between hostile launch and loss of your missiles.
So, while the USA and Russia might be able to ruin each other, and France and the UK can each pick out a country at random to nuke if they desire, the majority of the world will read about it in the paper the next day.
So one choice (not changing our ways) may or may not kill us, and the other (cleaning up) lets us survive a little longer, regardless of what the climate does. For once, let's just ignore those silly scientists and just do what won't get us killed.
Interesting that you assume that any change to our environmental policy will be for the better, by definition.
There's not really a lot of evidence that any proposed solution to climate change will do anything meaningful that'll improve our chances of suvival.
Certainly, the existing and proposed Treaties won't do jack....
The infrastructure in question; electrical and telecommunications mainly, is incredibly valuable. Especially so in the context of communicating for business and political purposes.
I would imagine there'd be more issues about providing food to the populace than "communicating for business and political purposes".
Or do you really think that the grocery stores and such are going to keep right on going with no power for, say, refrigerators?
Having lived through Katrina (I was in the eye of Katrina for a bit), I'm not especially thrilled at the possibility that power distribution might be knocked out over a large part of the world....
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So, you can point to Universities that increased dramatically in size (of the student body, not administratively) as a result of the availability of this student loan program? No?
As I recall, Louisiana has it set up so that if you get good enough grades in High School (basically, honor-roll level), then you get to go to any of the State Universities tuition-free for a year. If you do well in University that year, then the next year is also tuition-free.
Seems to work out pretty well for us.
And note that this is a STATE program, which is where education spending should be done, not at the Federal level.
State governments certainly have a legitimate role here.
But I can't seem to find any enumerated power in the Constitution that gives the Feds any legitimate role.
And the Tenth Amendment seems to preclude the Feds doing things that aren't enumerated in the Constitution.
Not that that's stopped the Feds for the last 75 or so years - after all, bribing the populace with their own money is a sure road to reelection....
Probably.
But that would probably require a Constitutional Amendment to make it work, because sure as shooting, the Reps and Dems would fight to keep any State from passing such a thing into law.
No, because it's generally true. If I favor the Reps (I don't), and vote Libertarian because they're closer to what I really want, then the Reps lose a vote.
Which means that the Dems now need one fewer vote to win the election.
Ditto if I favor the Dems (I don't) and vote Green.
Also, it should be noted that Libertarians are NOT "pro-corporation", since a corporation is a government-created entity (didn't know that, did you?), with certain legal advantages that would not be available under a purely Libertarian model.
As to your strawman: "someone you know robs banks. a vote for a Republican or Democrat is a vote to imprison your loved ones"...yep. Sure is.
Note that you won't get mj legalized by whining that you should be allowed to use it. You'll get it legalised once you convince your congresscritters that:
(a) most people want it legalized
(b) there's a lot of tax money to be made on mj
(c) it'll get them reelected when they otherwise wouldn't be.
Note that right now, most people don't really care enough one way or another about legalizing mj to make it worth the bother of legalizing it.
Note further that, if Prohibition is any guide, the people selling mj illegally are bribing pols to keep it that way.
Note, finally, that few enough incumbents are unseated in any given election that there is no chance that you'll ever get enough pols to vote it legal just to get reelected...
Don't bet too much on this. Currently, SS/Medicare amounts to a 14.4% tax on everyone working. We currently have about three taxpayers paying into the system to support every person taking money from the system.
If current demographic trends continue (life expectancy continues to increase, number of children per family continues to decline), we'll hit two workers per beneficiary in my lifetime (and I have cancer, and don't expect to reach "average life expectancy").
Which will require, as a minimum, an increase fro 14.4% to 21.6% just to fund social security and medicare, assuming that costs on both programs track with inflation (and they haven't on Medicare, ever).
So, you ready for a poor man paying combined federal/state/local taxes at a 50% rate? It'll be at least that bad before most of you die, and it'll continue to get worse after that - your grandchildren are each going to have to pay enough social security taxes to support ONE retiree each....
Of course, we could always do deficit spending to avoid the tax increases. Then, by and by, we'll be Greece....
Nonsense!
Only a true moron would be incapable of writing a bill accomplishing some good thing in such a way as to offend both other Parties if we had a third Party to offend.
The Parliamentary system tends to preclude this sort of thing, since the Government theoretically has an automatic majority vote in the legislature and can get whatever they want passed.
Note that "theoretically" isn't always the same as practice, what with coalition governments and that sort of thing. But it mostly works that way, as long as the Government lasts.
Note also that the word "government" means something different in Europe than it does here....
It should be noted that the Republicans feel exactly the same way.
It should also be noted that when the Republican House passed a measure last week to extend that interest rate, the President immmediately threatened a veto.
When all is said and done, the argument isn't about the student loan interest rate (everyone in Congress agrees it should be maintained as is), but about how to fund the loan program when it requires borrowing money at market rates and lending it out at below market rates.
The Dems picked this particular funding method not because they preferred it, but because they were pretty sure the Reps would oppose it. Just as the Reps in the House picked their funding method because they were pretty sure the Dems would oppose it.
Thus, both sides can say truthfully, that they TRIED to do this, but were stymied by [EVIL OTHER PARTY]...
Relevant to this...
Once upon a time, when you wanted a job with a company, they would give you an aptitude test, to determine whether you knew enough to do the job, or were bright enough to learn to do the job well.
Then, along came someone who argued that those aptitude tests were discriminatoy.
So, it became illegal to use aptitude tests for hiring purposes.
At that point, the companies changed policies to require a High School diploma, reasoning that getting the HS diploma showed, at least, that you were bright enough to learn to do the job.
Later, as new policies like "social promotion" gained popularity, HS diplomas became increasingly poor indicators of learning ability.
So now, many jobs require a Bachelor's Degree to get. Following the reasoning that a BA/BS shows you are at least bright enough to learn to do the job.
Alas, more and more people are getting through college without ever having had to learn to think well (or even having had to think).
You can, perhaps, predict where this is heading....
Alas,no.
Yes, some were mob lynchings. Which were illegal even then.
And yes, witch hunters were hired to do the work of locating witches. And like the Inquisition (which paid people a bounty for turning witches in), they never lacked for witches to investigate.
However (there's always a however), witch "trials" involved a judge. And they weren't run like Monty Python. Nor did judges just take the word of the witch hunters...
As I said, you generally had to get a confession. And torture was the preferred technique for extracting confessions (there have even been times and places where it was assumed that even a voluntary "confession" was unacceptable without verification by torture).
Note, by the by, that Friedrich von Spee (the guy who finally convinced the Church that torture didn't guarantee truth) was a witch hunter once upon a time, for those interested in the history of such things...
I think your view of 17th century witch trials has been distorted by too much Monty Python.
Witchcraft Trials in the 17th Century were generally run by the Inquisition, and pretty much required a confession for a conviction.
Hence the use of torture to extract a confession. After all, everyone knows that noone would lie under torture.
And yes, this was a common belief then. It lost a bit of appeal after Friedrich von Spee wrote his book on the subject, and provided good, logical arguments as to why torture didn't guarantee truth....
I agree with the other respondents - all the seats were sold.
I went to the earliest showing of the day, got there within ten minutes of the theatre actually opening, picked the format I expected the fewest other people to want to watch, and still had a bitch of a time finding three seats together for myself, wife, and daughter.
And there were NO empty seats when the show actually started.
There is obvously a fourth option, since I bought three tickets for the show this past Saturday morning for $15 TOTAL, not apiece.
So, basically you can afford it by getting your neighbors to pay for half of it?
The only problem with subsidies is that they only work if only a few people take advantage of them. If everyone decides it's a great idea, then they pay for half of your system, and you pay for half of their system, and you all end up paying full price.
Note, by the way, that I don't disapprove of you taking advantage of the subsidy - you should take EVERY benefit available to you, as long as you're paying taxes to the government.
That said, I do think that subsidies are designed primarily to siphon money from the taxpayers to unprofitable businesses, and are really a bad idea.
A variant of this has always been my preferred answer to the "healthcare crisis" (actually a "health insurance crisis") - reduce age of Medicare eligibility by three years every year, and make everyone under age 19 automatically eligible for Medicaid.
That would provide decent healthcare to all children, and make the transition to everyone using Medicare over a long enough period that the economy would have time to adjust to the change.
USS Savannah. She was built in the '60s, I believe, as a nuclear powered merchant ship. She's still on display as a museum ship somewhere on the East Coast, I believe.
Alas, fuel oil was cheap, so she was never profitable enough to make it worth the bother of repeating the design.
Nautilus didn't break through the ice at the North Pole. It sailed under ice the whole way over the North Pole.
Skate was the first to surface at the Pole, I'm pretty sure. Least, that's what they told us at Sub School.
Probably not so obvious as all that. I expect that after the first half dozen or so had accepted her friend requests, after that everyone knew she was a friend of [someone they already knew]...
And in the USA, we do exactly the same thing via gasoline taxes.
Your point was?
Of course, you don't pay Federal taxes for the Fire Department. Fire Departments come under State and/or Local taxes (depending on where you are).
That was true pretty much up to the time when politicians figured out they could bribe voters with their own money. After that, it just became a matter of figuring out new ways to bribe the voters every election cycle....
The TSA doesn't deal with that eventuality either, so we can dispense with the TSA, and not measurably increase our risk...
Well, historically, a lot of legislation of this sort has had an exception for government employees.
Which, if it's not obvious, public school teachers are....
Wouldn't even do that.
The missiles are aimed at something. There won't be time to re-aim them between hostile launch and loss of your missiles.
So, while the USA and Russia might be able to ruin each other, and France and the UK can each pick out a country at random to nuke if they desire, the majority of the world will read about it in the paper the next day.
Or read it real time on Twitter....
Interesting that you assume that any change to our environmental policy will be for the better, by definition.
There's not really a lot of evidence that any proposed solution to climate change will do anything meaningful that'll improve our chances of suvival.
Certainly, the existing and proposed Treaties won't do jack....
I would imagine there'd be more issues about providing food to the populace than "communicating for business and political purposes".
Or do you really think that the grocery stores and such are going to keep right on going with no power for, say, refrigerators?
Having lived through Katrina (I was in the eye of Katrina for a bit), I'm not especially thrilled at the possibility that power distribution might be knocked out over a large part of the world....