Did free college exist when you were growing up?

[birdguy 3,958]

10 minutes ago, Luke said:

Over the last few millennia, the young have a much better track record.

Maybe that's because there are more young people than old people and the old people that are left have retired and are not in the workplace anymore and complaining about the young is one of our hobbies.

I, for one, have been retired and absolutely non-productive for over 20 years.  I consume food and other resources.  I have a nice automobile as does my wife.  We live in an old but pretty nice house.  My principle hobbies are reading, flight simulation, watching old movies on television, and telling anyone who will listen how much harder life was when we were young and how the world is going to pot (no need to enumerate the cause or the monitors would close the thread).  I pay virtually no taxes except sales tax.  When I say virtually no taxes I mean no state income tax and just a few hundred dollars federal income tax on my military retirement annuity.

And you are paying for it by contributing to Social Security and DOD giving me virtually free healthcare, prescription drugs, and a nice pension.

So, if I were to complain abut student loans, and I do sometimes, I would be something of a hypocrite wouldn't I?

Noel

 

[JRMurray 214]

On 11/6/2021 at 11:20 AM, goates said:

While it isn't free, it is still heavily subsidized, and there are many scholarships available.

True. In BC, where I live, the government funds around 50-ish percent (not sure of the exact percentage, so don't quote me on this number) of a domestic student's tuition, with the rest being made up in student tuition and other income to the post-secondary institution. Scholarships are available, of course, but whether students actually apply for them is another story, sadly.

By the way, for an interesting comparison of post-secondary education in Canada and the USA, see here for similarities and here for differences.

[dave2013 1,151]

4 hours ago, Luke said:

Sweden has a debt/GDP ratio of 35%. The US is 107%.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/debt-to-gdp-ratio-by-country

Cheers!

I said "most" countries.  Sweden actually does a decent job at administering a social welfare state with high taxation.

Cheers!

Dave

[dave2013 1,151]

4 hours ago, Gregg_Seipp said:

My theory is more subtle as to why it's going up.  (Was much, much cheaper in the early nineties when I finished mine.)  Not so much supply and demand (demand is *always* there) but banks realizing they could make a great deal of loan income...and it's guaranteed too.  It just seemed that they saw a potential new source, if they could convince colleges to really raise their fees, which they all-too-willingly did.  Boom, instant revenue.  Which is a shame since it keeps people so far out they can't even fathom taking on the debt.  (E.g. my son won't even consider it.)  Colleges, also, used to look for older people to get degrees and take classes later in life...something I want to do.  They seem to have jettisoned that idea altogether.

Well, it actually is a question of supply and demand. 

What's happened is that the U.S. govt. decided that it would be a good idea to subsidize student loans so that everyone could have a college degree.  Sort of like the "ownership" society that many in govt. were espousing in the early 2000s wherein everyone could be a home owner, so the govt. backed home loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, getting home loans they were not qualified for.  Anyway, we all know how that turned out.

Whenever govt. subsidizes something, it increases demand for that something, thereby increasing its price.  If not for govt. backing and support, student loans would be more difficult to get and would have a higher interest rate.  This would result in fewer kids opting for college thereby reducing demand, and then college tuition, which is absurdly high, would decrease.

Moreover, if everyone has a college degree, then those degrees will not be as meaningful and will have less value.  In fact, many now are finding that a 4-year degree isn't enough so they need to get a graduate degree.

When I graduated high school in the late 80s, attending college was more difficult than it is now.  One had to have good grades and loans weren't as easy to get.  I had several friends who worked part-time jobs during school and full time in the Summer in order to get by.  Now all you have to do is have a passing grade to get in, and loans are easy to get because now they are provided directly by the federal govt. 

Dave

Edited November 7, 2021 by dave2013

[Luke 782]

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

I said "most" countries.  Sweden actually does a decent job at administering a social welfare state with high taxation.

Again, show your work. When you look at modern industrialized nations, almost all of them provide government health care and subsidized higher education (as well as levying higher taxes) and almost all have lower debt-GDP rations than the US.

Norway: 40.6%, Finland: 59.4%, Denmark: 33.2%, Germany: 59.8%, Netherlands: 48.6%, France: 98.1%, UK: 80.7%, Canada: 89.7%, Australia: 45.1%, New Zealand: 19.0%, Austria: 70.4%, Switzerland: 41.0%.

The only big outlier here is Italy, and that hasn't had a stable, effective government since Marcus Aurelius.

[Fielder 3,745]

Most students have packages of student aid, loans and some small grants. The high cost of tuition will not hurt the university's income stream because of all that 'aid'. They will have enough applicants, all they could want. And so the workshops and class labs will have over qualified instruments and systems because why not? The U is rolling in dough. The professors need not have a heavy teaching load. Just hire more profs. Cost is no object.

The establishment at the colleges are lighting their joints with hundred dollar bills. Uncle Sam and John Bull pays the bill by subsidizing low or no interest loans. No private company would like to issue such loans. The banks only do it because the law makes them do it. It's just part of the banks operating overhead. All of the bank's competitor banks have to issue those no profit money loss loans too. So the bank just charges more fees to the paying customers' accounts. And so the cost is passed on to us all.

If every student had to pay their own way, then University fees would probably be 1/3 of what they are now. Supply and demand would make it so.

[Bob Scott 7,756]

4 hours ago, Luke said:

To not say the year is a material omission. If you go back to 1985, the DoD budget was around $313B, which is around $797B. The world population then was around 4.8B, which gets you to $0.45/day in present dollars. That's certainly plausible.

I remain struck by your dogged determination that the question is absurd and refusal to dig into it. Even if $0.45 isn't enough, it's certainly less than one order of magnitude away and that makes it plausible - we have a history of squeezing out two or three orders of magnitude improvements in efficiency. Less than one is a piece of cake assuming there is an incentive to do it.

That suggests that we have reached the limit of human progress - if something is not being doing it's because it cannot. We both know that is not the case.

Please stop moving the goalposts. The assertion as made doesn't suggest that we abolish the military or that the amount would fund crisis relief in the absence of infrastructure. Could we reach a steady state situation where the current DOD budget would provide food? I think it's plausible, and if nothing else it's an interesting exercise for people to say "if not, then how close are we?" rather than claiming it's absurd and ridiculing it.

The world is full of old people who figure that they have everything figured out and remark at how absurd and ridiculous the younger generations are. Over the last few millennia, the young have a much better track record.

The year was, as I recall, 2015 or 2016.  Not 1985, during the Reagan buildup that ended the Cold War without the Hot War we expected.  I could be equally fallacious and set the timeline to 1935 when we barely kept a standing army.

I remain struck by the gaslighting I see here...the DOD budget is not enough, nor has it ever been enough, to feed the world, and it's pointless to debate that maybe it could be enough if only the world were different and things only cost ten cents on the dollar and unicorns could poop skittles. 

I didn't move the goalposts...the original argument I referenced was always about asserting as established fact a pie-in-the-sky academic pipe dream that abolishing US military spending (and as a consequence the US military) could immediately free up enough money to feed the world.  No.  Not then, not today.  In a future Utopia, well, has anyone seen those unicorns flying by yet?  In a college classroom, though, all things are possible because it's a fantasy world that doesn't push back like the real one.  Nobody gets bloodied or dies when a college professor gets it completely wrong.  No, college professors have tenure, which guarantees they can keep getting it wrong without consequence (to themselves, anyway) for as long as they like. 

The world is also full of young people (and old professors) that figure they have everything figured out without having actually done anything, but still remark on how useless the older generations that raised, fed, protected, and educated them are.  Colleges don't teach history we should remember and learn from, they teach ideology in its place, which foments that "we know better" misconception in wide swaths of their young, inexperienced charges.  The young have always had the advantage of being able to build upon (and to rest upon) the achievements of their progenitors...the young don't do it alone, us old guys didn't do it alone, and neither will our grandchildren after us do it alone.  Those who have gone before have seen and learned things the young still have not.  It's the nature of the passage of generations.

 

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."  -Mark Twain

[Fielder 3,745]

[dave2013 1,151]

Some more debt to GDP ratios:

Japan: 238%, Greece: 174%, Italy: 133%, Portugal: 120%, Belgium: 100%, France: 99%, Spain: 96%, Canada: 88%, UK: 86%

These countries 1)have much higher taxes on the middle class than the U.S., and 2)their defense expenditures relative to their GDP is <2% with the exception of Greece, France, and the UK.  Many of the European countries also have sky high national sales taxes of 15 - 25%, as well as high fuel taxes making gasoline prices there about 2.5 times what they are in the U.S.

The U.S. has much lower taxes on the middle class and maintains a large, powerful military which also protects its allies.

I'm not saying that the U.S. debt to GDP of 106% is acceptable, it's not.  However, if the U.S. wanted to, it could easily implement a national sales tax and increase marginal tax rates a bit to eliminate the deficit and lower the debt. Like in most nations, there is no political will to do this as it is easier to just borrow and print more money rather than actually pay for things.

Heavily indebted European social democracies have little room to raise taxes as they are already cripplingly high, therefore their only solution is to cut spending.  Italy recently did this by screwing over millions of its citizens with pension "reform", IE big cuts. 

Dave

 

Edited November 8, 2021 by dave2013

[Gregg_Seipp 572]

I'd just say this:  If the price of college in the US is a lot higher than college elsewhere, look for why.  There's an answer.

[birdguy 3,958]

4 hours ago, dave2013 said:

Sweden actually does a decent job at administering a social welfare state with high taxation.

I think high taxation is worth it if it reduces poverty, provides adequate healthcare and a decent life style for everybody.

Noel

[kdfw__ 543]

9 hours ago, Luke said:

 

I did the math. The DoD budget for FY21 is around $733 billion,

you're undercounting the true DOD budget to us taxpayers.  if accounting is done per private sector rules, the VA budget of 245B should be added to DOD budget get the true picture of the cost to taxpayers.

and why should taxpayers pay guaranteed pension for life with COLA to all military retirees?  maybe there is a free market based approach to determining who within the military should get such nice perks: for those who wage war and execute war and are rare in numbers (MOS in the strike fighter, bomber, infantry, undersea, artillery, SF communities, for example) and exclude those who squeaked by 20 years in staff positions in the rear?  But in the end, such market based distinctions are probably counterproductive anyway.

[cmpbellsjc 2,963]

1 hour ago, birdguy said:

I think high taxation is worth it if it reduces poverty, provides adequate healthcare and a decent life style for everybody.

Noel

Depends on what you consider a decent life style 😂😂

[sightseer 895]

25 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

Depends on what you consider a decent life style 😂😂

how about not forcing people with multiple disabilities into homelessness because our gov would rather give tax breaks to billionaires than help a multiply disabled person get food and shelter.

[dave2013 1,151]

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

I think high taxation is worth it if it reduces poverty, provides adequate healthcare and a decent life style for everybody.

Noel

OK.  Are you prepared to pay a 20-25% sales tax?

Are you also then prepared to pay a 15-20% income tax on your income below $25,000 with a small exemption of around $5-10K, then 30-40% on income above that?  Anything above around $50,000 would be taxed at 40+%.  Those are approximately the level of rates everyone would have to pay in order to live in a social democracy paradise where everyone gets "free" healthcare and subsidized housing abounds.

How about $8.00 a gallon for gasoline due to fuel taxes?

The top U.S. rate of 37% doesn't hit until $500,000.  U.S. Income tax for income below $40,000 for single and $80,000 for married is 10-12%.

Dave

 

 

Edited November 8, 2021 by dave2013