| Tax Tuition dont-get-cute | Thu, Apr 26, 2012 2:24 PM EST People should pay tax to buy higher education and college degrees. Colleges are now exposed as evil corporations, overpaying their CEOs and star faculty, underpaying their actual workers, and overcharging their customers and the government, and blatantly misrepresenting the cost and value of their diplomas, and they pay no taxes, not even a property tax. Screw them! A nice steep progressive tax on tuition would curb the trend of ever-rising tuition costs, and take the money from the schools, not the taxpayers. Yes, the increased cost of the tax would cause people to either pay it if they could, or choose a cheaper school, but soon I think the tax would eventually be absorbed by the schools, who would immediately have to lower their tuition rates to continue to attract students, and so they would have to cut salaries and research programs and new building projects and land grabs. Ooh, and we should grab back some of that land, just to sell it to developers to make money, as per Kelo. We know where the money is, we can see all the new expensive buildings going up and see the Lexuses and BMW’s at the end of long perfectly manicured Cambridge driveways, we hear about needless research and programs they spend money on. If there is going to be a bail-out of student debt, and there should be, it should not be paid by the tax payers, it should be paid by the schools. Recommended by nopolitician |
| Tongue in cheek?
I didn’t take it that way, especially since DGC has a history of “interesting” ideas. Some places, like Canada, have Good AND SERVICES tax so in general it might be worthy of discussion. However, my first reaction to the idea of taxing tuition specifically is, “You want to make tuition even LESS affordable?” That’s a service many non-wealthy strive to obtain! christopher @ Thu 26 Apr 4:05 PM |
| People can afford what they can afford
Universities will still be competing for the same students with the same amount of money. So I’m arguing that to stay competitive and keep their enrollments up, schools would absorb the tax and lower their tuition by the amount of the tax so their students can still afford it. Make them be the villains if they don’t lower their tuition. dont-get-cute @ Thu 26 Apr 5:58 PM |
Now 'tis all very well for the goodvolks over to the
(( WhightGuard Officers Mess ))
Blue Blazers very naturally don’t see things quite like that, for "Educational Darwinism," so to christen the nifty new ideoproduct, would adversely effect, if perhaps not themselves, then at least people they know and would not care to see distressed. Circumstances under which mainstream B.B.’s would "make them (purveyors of Tertiary Educationalism) be the villains" are not easy to imagine, apart from a few obvious profiteerin’ nogoodniks like the so-called "University of Phoenix."
Tert. Ed. is special, one might almost say ‘sacred’, in the eyes of Blazers. To teach college is such a wonderful, heart-warming, Life-enhancing activity, so ganz und gar geistig, that it seems to Their Worships to be well worth doing even when it is done pretty bad. Hence (as the present keyboard analyzes) the firm alliance between us supercerulæan H*rv*rds at one extreme and, say, Turtle Pond Community College at the other, an alliance that can never make a great deal of sense to the crude materialist. Why, ¡’tis as if all those pettybiz moms and pops out in Televisionland had, re verâ, no better and truer friend in all the world than Wal-Mart an´ Target and the rest of the retailin’ Godzillas!
Assuming, as Paddy does assume, that what we have here is basically a sort of afterglow from the former Christojudæanity, no doubt the ‘competition’ Neoperuna will find itself a comfy niche in the Tert. Ed. market sooner or later. ‘Later’, however, may mean whole decades and degenerations, centuries even, from here and now. The Numinous tends to have a long, long half-life.
Meanwhile, back in the Mess, perhaps Dr. Cuteless and like-minded WhiteGuardists can do a little to hasten the day when Tert. Ed. shall cease at last to be too hot to be touched. American D*cl*ne, for instance, offers some promising possibilities: on the supply side, fewer and fewer Homeland™ers will have enough "spare change" to set up as even the most humble imitators of John D. Geckefeller--¡wunnerful man was he! [*]--and the University of Chicagonomics. All those AEIdeologues, and Catoholics, and Heritagitarians, and Hoovervillains of Palo Alto, &c. &c. may be in for less support from their Venerable Funders than they are countin’ on as well, though that is rather another story.
On the demand side, it seems pretty likely that the blessèd Jobcreationist Class will not be hirin’ a large number of the recent and future fruits of Tertiary Educationalism. Not the local fruits, anyway. Shanghai and Bangalore, I dunno about for sure. The general tendency of outsizin’ and downsourcin’ and baincappin’ does not look good for Tert. Ed., though I hesitate to presume to be a competent judge of such purely economic appearances as these. Still, compelled at gunpoint to specuvest on the economic future one way or the other, I would definitely *not* assume a completely price-inelastic attitude about the wunnerfulness of Uncle Sam disposing of a huge reserve army of overeducated (or, if you prefer, over-‘educated’) plebes and proles.
Though ¿Possibly if one were to conscript them into the real Army . . . ?
Happy days.
--JHM
_____
[*] John D. Rockefeller (by F. Frank Steigmeyer)
(3 verses plus chorus:)
John D. Rockefeller
Wonderful man is he,
Gives all his spare change to the U. of C.
He keeps the ball a rolling
In our great Varsity;
He pays Doctor Harper
To help us grow sharper,
To the glory of U. of C.
No comments:
Post a Comment