Of course, I want to get rid of corporate income tax, replacing it with full-income tax rates on capital gains and dividends, so I'd lose the tax-cut incentive. But I think you have the right idea given the current tax structure. Businesses can already write off tuition reimbursement, so the tax-cut would have to be even larger. Maybe make it so the student is indebted to the corporation for the loan (with a government guarantee) and the longer they work for the corporation, the less they owe - to protect the corporation's investment? Of course, this creates something like indentured servitude:) We'd have to make the debt transferable. The upside is that the training a person received is more likely to fit in with the needs of their job - not just a blanket "liberal arts" education for all.
Well, I think both areas need fixing. I think we need to offer any adult who wants it a way to afford a college education of some sort - and the student loan program might not be the best way to accomplish that. I also think we need to fix K-12.
I think the real interesting bit is that if Chavez actually succeeds in educating people (as opposed to indoctrinating people), he might kill off his own revolution.
LOL, you are really diverging from my main point! I agree that you need a strong middle class. I agree that our education system isn't really matching up skill sets with demand. I'm not in any way trying to hold up the US as an example of an educated populace.
The main thrust is that if you are a rich guy, and you find yourself complaining that the ignorant rabble keep screwing up your country, then you probably should direct your resources toward making them less ignorant instead of trying to suppress them. Similarly, if you are a libertarian, you have to know that there is no way a bunch of ignorant poor people are going to go along with your high-minded ideology. You have two choices - force it down their throats, thus completely betraying your ideology, or get them educated. You can try some kind of charitable ideologically pure education scheme, or you can suck it up and pay for their education through the state. That's where I'm at:)
Are you saying that the bulk of Venezuela's population is well-educated? Prior to Chavez, more than 70% of university students aome from the wealthiest 20% of the population. I suspect that if the rich in Venezuela had remedied this, there would be no Chavez.
For the past two centuries we have had a large 'uneducated class' of voters.
Two centuries? They changed a lot over the past two centuries, and there is no reason to expect things to stay static now. 200 years ago, the "middle class" would be landowning farmers. 50 years ago, it was almost all either white-collar jobs or factory workers. Factory jobs for the uneducated are gone - like the farm jobs before them - so you need education if you want a sizable middle class.
This has less to do with education and more to do with entitlement.....which can be found across the socioeconomic spectrum.
The part where education comes in is when people like Hugo Chavez come in promising the ignorant everything, and the ignorant never learned what a dictator looks like so they vote him all sorts of special powers as he stubs out freedom of the press, nationalizes industries, and destroys the economy. Of course entitlement is a problem, but educated people can see when they are in a pickle - even places in Europe where socialism is worn with pride are coming to terms with their spending. In the UK, when they ran out of money the relatively educated populace cut back spending - they didn't start scarfing up profitable industries and closing newspapers run by the rich.
Who says that the colleges weren't "highly subsidized" in the days when the AC remembers being able to work his way through them with a summer job? State schools and teachers colleges were almost free back then, IIRC.
Except that we have a large educated class of citizens...
We also have a large underclass who we promote through high school regardless of merit. The US is consistently ranked quite low for education among industrialized countries.
You can never spend enough or legislate enough to make life fair or create "social justice".
That's not what I'm advocating. I'm being completely selfish and saying that without an educated majority, we are doomed to have the producers taxed heavily just to placate the non-producers. It is in the "1%" best interest to subsidize the education of the "99%" - they will hold on to far more of their fortune if the government isn't nationalizing all of the profitable industries.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that it is particular to your locality instead of using the ambiguous "most". Here, you can have a 13 credit load for "free", though as you mention books are not included in that.
I'm still not convinced that the deflation naturally follows. The devil is in the details.
You have a good point... you could always start the reductions and call it off if prices don't stabilize or drop. Perhaps if that were the case, you could start taxing colleges' incomes on their foreign students at such a rate that it encourages them to be more appealing to domestic students. No one said government regulation was easy!:)
I didn't mean to let my defense of government-funded education imply that I though the current system was ideal. I think there is a lot of room for education reform in this country - including the student loan program.
LOL, I love the idea of MS offsets. We should trade them on a central exchange. Just like people can fly guilt-free knowing that someone will plant a tree to offset their trip, they can use Android and pay you to cut the MS-related guilt.
What we have now is nothing compared to what they have in Europe, or even Canada. Sure, we have free health care - but only for the old and the poor. Even when Obamacare kicks in, the health care is still private - you are just required to carry it.
Take away the free education and see what the morons vote for themselves.
And more to the point, you can go to college for free - at least the first two years. Most community colleges are priced right around the same amount as the federal education tax credit.
Because without government education, you end up with a large uneducated class of people. When a bunch of uneducated people have voting rights, they will vote themselves so many government programs that you'll wish you'd bent your libertarian views just a smidgen. Venezuela is a good example.
I say this as someone who's ideology is based in libertarian, but with a hefty dose of pragmatism.
I mean, it only makes sense. Why the hell should a company I own part of spend some of my profits on political ads I don't agree with?
Not a bad idea, but I don't think public corporations are the problem. Look up the Koch brothers... they are responsible for a tremendous amount of money in politics and they own the companies in question outright (privately owned). Further, the idea fails the "NY Times Test". The Times would not be able to have an Opinion/Editorial section if they had to seek the approval of their shareholders.
but the entire ideal of owned entities being 'people' is a bit surreal to start with. That really makes no sense at all.
I have to suggest you read the decision - they weren't making that argument at all. The whole "corporation=person" meme came from the press, not the judges.
Even if you count them as actual people, actual people already have limits on campaign giving!
So do corporations... Citizens United wasn't about campaign contributions - it was about issue ads.
I can think of some remedies for Citizen's United, I think: - Make all corporate donations transparent. No more setting up a shell corporation, only to secretly fund it and let it fund another corporation which runs issue ads. Thus we will at least know exactly what companies are funding this garbage. - Don't offer tax exemption for money spent on ads. Make certain exceptions, such as money spent on fundraising. We should recognize that no significant "education" is going to happen in a 30-second commercial spot.
I'm sure there are more strategies... but I have to admit it is a difficult problem.
I think peer review is an excellent metric. But I also think standardized tests can have a place. At the very least, you can compare teachers working alongside one another in the same school. If there are three 3rd grade teachers, and one of them consistently has lower scores coming from her kids, I think it is fair to say that there is something going on with that teacher.
The biggest thing teachers need to be protected from in my mind is vindictive parents and children. "My kid can't possibly be the problem"
Ugh, yeah, parents can be horrible.
but honestly what is the union supposed to do?
My opinion is that the union would better serve their workers by protecting the trade for the long term, rather than trying to protect every last worker. What I mean is that by protecting obviously bad teachers, they weaken the position of all of the teachers. It is silly to deny that there are bad teachers, and statistics seem to indicate that teachers are not often fired.
all one can do is enforce the rules that theoretically both sides agreed on.
This isn't really entirely true - at least not in my state. The school board's hands are tied on some very large issues. For instance, tenure is not negotiable - it is enforced by state law. Pensions are also dictated by state law. And of course, the teachers are all required to be in the union - if they want to be teachers, they have no choice but to "agree" to the terms of the contract.
I agree that unions are demonized unfairly, but I also feel that they resist reforms that are often times in their best interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I think like you :)
Of course, I want to get rid of corporate income tax, replacing it with full-income tax rates on capital gains and dividends, so I'd lose the tax-cut incentive. But I think you have the right idea given the current tax structure. Businesses can already write off tuition reimbursement, so the tax-cut would have to be even larger. Maybe make it so the student is indebted to the corporation for the loan (with a government guarantee) and the longer they work for the corporation, the less they owe - to protect the corporation's investment? Of course, this creates something like indentured servitude :) We'd have to make the debt transferable. The upside is that the training a person received is more likely to fit in with the needs of their job - not just a blanket "liberal arts" education for all.
It also helps when your geography is such that during the cold war, everyone wanted to throw money at you to be their friend.
Well, like I said - I'm not a supporter of his policies necessarily :)
Well, I think both areas need fixing. I think we need to offer any adult who wants it a way to afford a college education of some sort - and the student loan program might not be the best way to accomplish that. I also think we need to fix K-12.
Ah, sorry to put words in your mouth.
I think the real interesting bit is that if Chavez actually succeeds in educating people (as opposed to indoctrinating people), he might kill off his own revolution.
LOL, you are really diverging from my main point! I agree that you need a strong middle class. I agree that our education system isn't really matching up skill sets with demand. I'm not in any way trying to hold up the US as an example of an educated populace.
The main thrust is that if you are a rich guy, and you find yourself complaining that the ignorant rabble keep screwing up your country, then you probably should direct your resources toward making them less ignorant instead of trying to suppress them. Similarly, if you are a libertarian, you have to know that there is no way a bunch of ignorant poor people are going to go along with your high-minded ideology. You have two choices - force it down their throats, thus completely betraying your ideology, or get them educated. You can try some kind of charitable ideologically pure education scheme, or you can suck it up and pay for their education through the state. That's where I'm at :)
Are you saying that the bulk of Venezuela's population is well-educated? Prior to Chavez, more than 70% of university students aome from the wealthiest 20% of the population. I suspect that if the rich in Venezuela had remedied this, there would be no Chavez.
I don't think community colleges are subsidized by the feds, either.
For the past two centuries we have had a large 'uneducated class' of voters.
Two centuries? They changed a lot over the past two centuries, and there is no reason to expect things to stay static now. 200 years ago, the "middle class" would be landowning farmers. 50 years ago, it was almost all either white-collar jobs or factory workers. Factory jobs for the uneducated are gone - like the farm jobs before them - so you need education if you want a sizable middle class.
This has less to do with education and more to do with entitlement.....which can be found across the socioeconomic spectrum.
The part where education comes in is when people like Hugo Chavez come in promising the ignorant everything, and the ignorant never learned what a dictator looks like so they vote him all sorts of special powers as he stubs out freedom of the press, nationalizes industries, and destroys the economy. Of course entitlement is a problem, but educated people can see when they are in a pickle - even places in Europe where socialism is worn with pride are coming to terms with their spending. In the UK, when they ran out of money the relatively educated populace cut back spending - they didn't start scarfing up profitable industries and closing newspapers run by the rich.
And free crap education isn't going to placate them in the least.
Indeed - it is important that the education be effective.
Who says that the colleges weren't "highly subsidized" in the days when the AC remembers being able to work his way through them with a summer job? State schools and teachers colleges were almost free back then, IIRC.
Except that we have a large educated class of citizens...
We also have a large underclass who we promote through high school regardless of merit. The US is consistently ranked quite low for education among industrialized countries.
You can never spend enough or legislate enough to make life fair or create "social justice".
That's not what I'm advocating. I'm being completely selfish and saying that without an educated majority, we are doomed to have the producers taxed heavily just to placate the non-producers. It is in the "1%" best interest to subsidize the education of the "99%" - they will hold on to far more of their fortune if the government isn't nationalizing all of the profitable industries.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that it is particular to your locality instead of using the ambiguous "most". Here, you can have a 13 credit load for "free", though as you mention books are not included in that.
I'm still not convinced that the deflation naturally follows. The devil is in the details.
You have a good point... you could always start the reductions and call it off if prices don't stabilize or drop. Perhaps if that were the case, you could start taxing colleges' incomes on their foreign students at such a rate that it encourages them to be more appealing to domestic students. No one said government regulation was easy! :)
Where does it say educated has to be College?
I didn't mean to let my defense of government-funded education imply that I though the current system was ideal. I think there is a lot of room for education reform in this country - including the student loan program.
LOL, I love the idea of MS offsets. We should trade them on a central exchange. Just like people can fly guilt-free knowing that someone will plant a tree to offset their trip, they can use Android and pay you to cut the MS-related guilt.
You are trolling the wrong platform. This is Android, made by Google.
We have that now
What we have now is nothing compared to what they have in Europe, or even Canada. Sure, we have free health care - but only for the old and the poor. Even when Obamacare kicks in, the health care is still private - you are just required to carry it.
Take away the free education and see what the morons vote for themselves.
Just gradually phase out the loan program. Reduce the payout by $500 every year and in 25 years it will be gone.
I don't think I'm in favor of eliminating student loans, but it would be easy enough to phase the program out.
And more to the point, you can go to college for free - at least the first two years. Most community colleges are priced right around the same amount as the federal education tax credit.
Because without government education, you end up with a large uneducated class of people. When a bunch of uneducated people have voting rights, they will vote themselves so many government programs that you'll wish you'd bent your libertarian views just a smidgen. Venezuela is a good example.
I say this as someone who's ideology is based in libertarian, but with a hefty dose of pragmatism.
I know everyone doesn't commute to work, but don't you see how this might appeal to people whose hands/attention is otherwise occupied?
I mean, it only makes sense. Why the hell should a company I own part of spend some of my profits on political ads I don't agree with?
Not a bad idea, but I don't think public corporations are the problem. Look up the Koch brothers... they are responsible for a tremendous amount of money in politics and they own the companies in question outright (privately owned). Further, the idea fails the "NY Times Test". The Times would not be able to have an Opinion/Editorial section if they had to seek the approval of their shareholders.
but the entire ideal of owned entities being 'people' is a bit surreal to start with. That really makes no sense at all.
I have to suggest you read the decision - they weren't making that argument at all. The whole "corporation=person" meme came from the press, not the judges.
Even if you count them as actual people, actual people already have limits on campaign giving!
So do corporations... Citizens United wasn't about campaign contributions - it was about issue ads.
I can think of some remedies for Citizen's United, I think:
- Make all corporate donations transparent. No more setting up a shell corporation, only to secretly fund it and let it fund another corporation which runs issue ads. Thus we will at least know exactly what companies are funding this garbage.
- Don't offer tax exemption for money spent on ads. Make certain exceptions, such as money spent on fundraising. We should recognize that no significant "education" is going to happen in a 30-second commercial spot.
I'm sure there are more strategies... but I have to admit it is a difficult problem.
Peer review maybe?
I think peer review is an excellent metric. But I also think standardized tests can have a place. At the very least, you can compare teachers working alongside one another in the same school. If there are three 3rd grade teachers, and one of them consistently has lower scores coming from her kids, I think it is fair to say that there is something going on with that teacher.
The biggest thing teachers need to be protected from in my mind is vindictive parents and children. "My kid can't possibly be the problem"
Ugh, yeah, parents can be horrible.
but honestly what is the union supposed to do?
My opinion is that the union would better serve their workers by protecting the trade for the long term, rather than trying to protect every last worker. What I mean is that by protecting obviously bad teachers, they weaken the position of all of the teachers. It is silly to deny that there are bad teachers, and statistics seem to indicate that teachers are not often fired.
all one can do is enforce the rules that theoretically both sides agreed on.
This isn't really entirely true - at least not in my state. The school board's hands are tied on some very large issues. For instance, tenure is not negotiable - it is enforced by state law. Pensions are also dictated by state law. And of course, the teachers are all required to be in the union - if they want to be teachers, they have no choice but to "agree" to the terms of the contract.
I agree that unions are demonized unfairly, but I also feel that they resist reforms that are often times in their best interest.