The day after they become legal adults? (In most things anyway). If the child turned 18 during high school, at what point was she supposed to be raising money to go to college on?
Oh please. Prop 13 was put into law in the late 70’s - since that time many other taxes, such as the income tax we all pay, have been raised to make up for any loss from that. Also remember that Prop 13 only has a serious affect if a property has one owner for any length of time. Given how high property taxes are when one buys a new/another home, it seems to have balanced out. Of course, right now it’s an issue because of the drop in the real estate market, but that isn’t a normal state of things here.
Well, yeah, our government sucks but I don’t think that is unique to California. Also, Sacramento can (and has) raised existing taxes without asking the voters. As far as I can tell, referendums are for things the individual cities want to do, or maybe even the counties, but I don’t remember any statewide ones.
And it still doesn’t address the base problem, which is a majority population that thinks that the government should provide every citizen with as close as possible to a middle class life. Which I don’t think would be possible in any state, but certainly not one that has a constant flow of illegals into it.
I don’t think that could be done here - would states like Montana or North Dakota be able to make it on their own without federal funds? I’d think that there would be fixed costs in running a college, no matter where it was, and I wonder if states with low populations would be able to finance colleges on their own.
Wouldn’t that be more affected by the freedom US companies have to ship jobs off shore? Also, don’t we import more competing goods?
This isn’t how it was when I was 18 (for others around me). Most of the kids I graduated high school with were going to go to some sort of secondary school, paid for by specific college savings funds their parents had set up when they were born. Scrambling around looking for scholarships and other ways of paying for tuition was almost unknown. I just don’t get why any parent would think that an 18 year old can be self reliant, particularly these days when a high school education is next to worthless.
It’s the same “sane” policy that assumes that because they were my parents, they were the best people to raise me. I would certainly hope that a majority of parents care enough about their children that they plan for their future, instead of just cutting them loose as soon as their legal obligation is fulfilled. Perhaps if the government went with my idea to add an education tax for each child, fewer people would have kids that they only want until the cute factor wears off.
And this still doesn’t answer the question of why it is that people who had no choice in whether or not any college bound kid was born are expected to pay his tuition.
I take it you don’t live in a state with income tax? Perhaps a state with a relatively low population? On our one middle class income we pay about $30K a year between the fed and the state income taxes. Just those two - that doesn’t include our property tax, sales tax, user fees on the vehicles and on and on. Do you really want to be paying out that kind of money each year? Or would it be better if more people decided to be responsible for themselves and just maybe live within their means.
As much as I trust that government can disburse funds accurately and with a minimum of fuss, I don’t necessarily trust ANYONE to fully predict the job market enough to subsidize the correct mix of degrees.
There are conservative economists (notably Milton Friedman) who would say that it’s possible and desirable for the government to provide a lower-middle-class life to everyone (see his negative income tax proposal).
I don’t think illegals are really germane, either. I’m not one for asylum, and I’m heavily in favor of coming down hard on people who hire illegals (since everything from prohibition to the war on drugs have proven that you can’t stop illegal things coming in, you have to cut off demand).
One of the reasons I’m in favor of more Federal policies in the US for things like this–the US has a fairly unique combination of state government power and wildly diverse incomes and population densities, and they make state-based solutions come out as unfair much of the time due to what are essentially historical accidents of borders.
Both fruitful places for regulation, IMHO.
It is likely geographically dependent. I’m quite a bit younger than you, and less than a third of my graduating class in high school went to college (in 1997). Only a small percentage of them are welfare bums, about the national average–most of them are making a fairly decent rural living, and to be honest many of them have nearly as high an overall standard of living than my college-educated self just due to cost-of-living differences (mostly in housing). Almost no one, myself included, got much parental help–I scrambled for scholarships since 75% of my college fund got sunk into dad’s business to get it through a rough patch. I lucked out in that I got enough scholarships for it to not matter, but even in 1997 the $1500/semester merit scholarship I got from PSU covered more than half my tuition.
The problem with that is creating perverse incentives, IMHO. Right now, the government has decided (not without reason) that subsidizing children via tax credits is in our collective best interest, and spreading the cost of education over the citizens of each school district via property taxes reflects the fact that most of our country’s jobs require a high school or vocational education. Given that, and given that more and more of our country’s jobs require a college degree, it seems a logical extension of existing policies that have worked for a long time to extend those subsidies to college.
As said above: an educated populace is in the best interests of everyone, because our economy is increasingly technically oriented. Because a more educated populace eventually results in a larger overall GDP and larger overall tax base, educating those kids is ultimately of benefit to you.
It would appear that my state’s income tax is about 1/3 of yours. I’d happily pay the 10% I’d be paying in CA if it meant returning/increasing the state subsidies to higher education and maybe getting a decent goddamn public single-payer health plan going.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I live in PA. I get to watch the fruits of excessively conservative spending policies every time I drive (the roads are horribly under-maintained here, due to budget cuts), every time I smell the (coal-tinged) air, every time I see another news article about pollution due to inadequate funding at the state environmental protection agency…and seeing a 10% tuition hike at the state schools along with thousands of high-paying university jobs lost to save a pitiful 2.4% of the state general fund budget. You bet your ass I’d take the tax hike to keep those jobs in this state–hell, every single job I’ve had has been at one spinoff company or another from Penn State’s research programs. In the long run, it makes sense.
Sounds like I’ll have to teach them a thing or two about not being all whiny and resentful about decisions made in the past which “could have” or “should have” affected today in some way. Isn’t that like monday morning quarterbacking?
This is why I said, way back a few pages of thread ago, that I won’t be feeding the system. So if it’s even harder in 10 or 15 years, then that means that when my kids have kids, it’ll be beyond any description of harder, and at some point it’s all gonna come tumbling down, or the bubble will burst, or something will change. I’ve decided to bow out NOW, and let the chips fall where they may. I’m pretty confident that everything is gonna be alright though. If they want to go to college, I’ll support that decision, but I ain’t footing the bill. They can hate me if they want, but I highly doubt it. And if they did, it wouldn’t be very productive in their situation, so if I’ve raised them the way I intend to, they’ll get over it and find another way to move forward.
If I’m ever in a situation where a fucking college education is required just to get a hot meal and shelter in this country, then I’m fucking moving - to the damn woods if I have to. Fuck *that *shit.
When I have time I’ll look that up - does he have any suggestions one what to do about those who choose not to work?
Illegals are germane because they use resources and don’t pay back into the system. It may be the reason why California is in so much financial trouble, I don’t know because I don’t know the numbers on the percentage of “legals” who are doing the same thing.
Then, pointing out how Germany does things doesn’t really apply here, yes?
Or at least a good hard look at them anyway.
The point I was making was not the percentage that went to college, but that those who went did so because their parents had saved up the money for them to do so. Which your parents also did, but unfortunately had to use it for a crisis. What happened between 1997 and now that makes it (apparently) a taxpayer responsibility rather than a parental one to provide college funds?
Not to me. College may be required for more jobs but not near enough to justify the cost to the taxpayer. Add in that many college degrees are essentially worthless in the job market, plus the number of kids that never graduate, plus the number of women (yes, I’m going to say it) who waste a college degree on being a SAHM. Then there is the growing problem that our government subsidized K-12 schools are more and more merely glorified babysitting. I have enough of a problem that I have to pay inflated property taxes for our local schools, but at least most of those graduates can read and write and more or less function in society. However, if you or your offspring want to get a good job, that should be your responsibility, not mine, to at least try to pay for higher education.
We’ll still need plumbers, key punchers, gardeners, etc. You want your children to have a better job than that, you pay for it. You want a larger overall GDP and tax base, work on getting more people off their butts and into the job force. You want a better educated populace, do something about our public schools - begin with getting rid of No Child Left Behind.
Except, it doesn’t mean any of that. CA is a perfect example of a major waste of taxpayer funds.
Well, tax hikes haven’t kept jobs in CA - they are driving them away. We also have under-maintained roads, pollution and I think? a higher population density. Apparently raising taxes doesn’t fix the things you think it will.
Y’know, this is too interesting a topic to be a hijack of this thread. Negative Income Tax
That’s not a good way of making decisions, though. You’re suggesting killing programs that help the state and economy because something unrelated to those programs is hurting the state’s economy.
It proves that it is structurally possible to do it in a modern first-world democracy.
In my opinion, the increasing number of jobs that require some level of college training is a good thing for our economy, and in order for our economy to continue expanding in that direction quickly, it’s a matter of good policy to encourage and support kids who want to fill those roles. Who then end up paying more taxes than they would otherwise and making more money than otherwise, producing a net lifetime gain.
Unfortunately it’s part and parcel of the same thing. As you say above, you’re just as unhappy about paying for public schools for kids you don’t have, too. At some point you have to decide what the dues you pay to be a member of society are, regardless of how you personally benefit from each and every little thing.
Not in the current political climate, no it does not. Yet, the roads got built, and the environmental protection laws kept the coal mines from destroying the landscape, and none of this was as big a problem in my youth as it is now. It’s my opinion that at some point in the last two decades, so-called “conservatives” got the idea that the best way to get smaller government was to make government suck so badly that people would forget that, by and large, it works.
I’m currently driving to Oregon but I think I’ll have time to look at that tomorrow. My bloody email is all backed up…
I don’t think I’ve suggested killing any programs, just no more new taxes! I also don’t understand how people living off the government without putting much or anything back in is unrelated to the programs that are killing us?
For it to be a valid example, it needs to be possible here. It’s one thing to ask why can’t we be like Europe, but another when you realize that, well, we ain’t Europe.
I just don’t have your rosy outlook on life I guess. Perhaps as you get older, you’ll turn into an old fart too, due to seeing so many people sucking up everything they can get but not being willing to pay back in. Christ, I’ve been paying to send strangers’ kids to school for decades and now you all want me to pay to send them to college as well? The taxpayer footing the bill for K-12 hasn’t worked all that well lately.
I’m also not sure why increasing the number of jobs that require college is a good thing for the economy? What are we going to do when, say, plumbers are so rare that they cost a thousand dollars just to come look at your problem?
I didn’t start having a problem with paying for K-12 until it started being a glorified babysitter. Maybe this is just a CA issue, or maybe just a S CA issue, but our high school grads have about as much education as grade schoolers did when I was in school. Part of this is because of No Child Left Behind, part of it is because of the drive to not reward any child above any other, part of it is because parents don’t seem to be involved in their kids’ schoolwork much any more. When I was still working, we would get temps with high school diplomas who couldn’t speak or write using proper English or spelling, who were incapable of all but the most basic math and whose grasp of history was about the same level as Sarah Palin’s. And yet, until the economy crashed, there would be a referendum to raise money for the school on almost every ballot. I guess I’m just sick and tired of throwing money down that particular black hole, especially since so many parents seem to think it is all the school system’s responsibility to educate their kids.
Eh, that’s always been true. I remember my father raving about the government 40 years ago. But yes, governments tend to be at least a little corrupt, so why would you want them responsible for money to send kids to college??
Lemme whip out an economics-textbook type example. So suppose you invest a fraction of your income every week, let’s call it 11%, into a fund that has a long-term positive rate of return, however small it might be. This is our analogy for higher education spending (the percentages in this example are from CA’s budget. Suppose then, too, that some jackass comes up to you and steals outright 2-14% of your income. (amount spent on illegal immigrants in CA estimate range–low, factcheck.org, high, FAIR)
So because a guy is robbing you, you invest less in a program that is making you a profit?
Largely, I think, due to political climate rather than any particular structural differences in areas other than transportation.
I grew up in a town with 90% of the people on welfare, and a mayor who openly bragged about trying to get as much federal and state grant money as possible regardless of whether or not that money was paying for anything useful or desired. I have been getting less cynical as I get older.
That’s never going to happen–primarily because a lot of pragmatists like me would go to night school to become plumbers in an absolute heartbeat if they ever started to outpay our IT jobs. =P
School issues are highly regional, due primarily to the fact the funding sources are predominantly local–CA is a major exception, but as I’ve said before, I’m given to understand your property tax structure is not controlled by anyone making direct spending decisions, which leads to perverse outcomes. Here in PA, we tend to have outcomes more or less middle of the road, but my brother’s a teacher and his opinion and experience has been that schooling outcomes are more heavily influenced by parental attitudes than anything else–and that’s something we never really address on any level.
Perceptions, I suppose. My father, despite being a staunch Republican his whole life, never had a particular problem with government until the middle Clinton years. As for corruption–it’s relative. In my day to day experiences (I work for a government contractor, on top of everything else), “government” is the least corrupt class of entity I work with by a large margin.
You need to put those two things together to create one scenario for it to fit CA. The guy robbing me is also the one that supposedly is going to be giving me that rate of return. Which is another problem with your analogy - you have far more faith that a vast majority of college students will end up being worthwhile members of society. I have never been able to find a study of this, but news programs (and no, I do not look at Faux News) and stories tend to show that providing a free education along with all the other freebies that the lower income folks get doesn’t tend to result in a productive citizen. We can’t even seem to get them to graduate high school, much less go to college.
Distances, wide variation in population, wide variation in climate…
This was in PA? Why wasn’t the mayor arrested?
Would you do so if you had to pay the same rate to go to plumber school as you do to go to a four year college?
At least in my city’s school district, property tax may not be their primary source of income due to all of the bonds that were passed prior to the current economy. Plus they get money from the fed, more now that they are following the fed’s ideas.
I quite agree with your brother and would like to see parents held far more responsible for their kids’ schooling. Even my asshole father helped us with our homework and paid attention to our grades.
My father was a rabid Democrat and the first President I remember him yelling at (on the TV) was Nixon. I suppose he had a point with that one but it didn’t end there - he didn’t like Johnson either, and he was always upset with whoever the governor was.
I used to work for Kaiser Permanente (do you all have that out there?), on the government side. I have no idea if they were actually corrupt, but the amount of money that was wasted was unbelievable. While it was nice to have all new equipment all the time and my own office with a door and a window, I was just a temp coding contractor, learning on the job FFS. The private side - well, let’s just say you could tell the difference…
My daughter, yet another brainiac, was a straight A student in an all-girls’ Catholic high school. She went to CSUS (California State University at Sacramento) for two years and then transfered with no problems to UC Berkeley. Less expensive for us and provided a better transition for her, financially, academically and socially.
Remind me again - why are you trying to draw a comparison between us?
Are you trying to lump both of us into some sort of “ignorant hippy lazy handout wanting loser” category? Or just trying to firmly establish your *obvious *dominance over our meager and uninformed opinions? :rolleyes:
From what I can tell…myself and the OP probably don’t share very much in common. But if you’re trying to get a dig in by holding us both up to the same light and calling it a match, well then go ahead.
I’ll be exiting this thread, and viewing most of what you say in the future with an extremely suspect eye. Something tells me you’ve got some sort of superiority complex, or a burning need to shitstorm what you call “evidence” of your correctness at any and all differing viewpoints.
I think we might be talking about different things here, somehow. I don’t for a minute believe we should willy-nilly send everyone to college, nor do I believe that people who fail to meet academic qualifications should be given subsidies.
Aside from the idea that somehow you expect that illegal immigrants are going to be able to apply to college and use these funds, which is what your first two sentences seem to imply. I’m not arguing that illegal immigrants cost your state money (they do), I’m arguing that they’re unlikely in the extreme to be costing you money for higher education costs.
I don’t see our population as being all that significantly more variable than Europe’s, and I don’t see what climate has to do with politics.
Because it was all legal and correct, just…stupid. The most recent one was getting a Interior grant to improve our local waterways to the tune of a few million. Our “local waterway” is a single creek I can jump over without exerting myself at any point between spring and where it dumps into the West Branch, but because it is TECHNICALLY part of the Chesapeake watershed, there’s money for it. So we ended up with a few culvert bridges being out of service for months to be redone, at great inconvenience to pretty much everyone, and the mayor brags about that money being points on her “scorecard”.
I paid to go to a four year college to get THIS degree, so. It’s a return-on-investment calculation.
Ugh, bonds. Bond issues should be limited to major capital improvements IMHO. At least they’re mostly opt-in.
The problem is how to create appropriate incentives. Bro taught in a broke DC suburb for his first few years–if you tried to tax those parents directly to pay for education, half of them would have deadbeated out of it and they’d all have pushed back on the system so hard it would have gotten worse. Where he is now (rural PA), that might be effective, but he’s got other problems there of a party-agnostic nature (jerks on the school board who’ve got a $5mil+ slush fund but who won’t lower property taxes, preferring to pay for ad campaigns to demonize the teacher’s union request for a typical inflation raise).
That last is actually a big part of my problem. I always hear news stories about how horrible education is wrt the teacher’s unions and tenured people screwing off, but between my Assistant Dean father-in-law and tenured high school teacher brother, neither of them see the kind of problems that are thought (based on media coverage) to be endemic.
We’re surrounded by it (it’s in Ohio and Virginia, but not PA).
Let’s just say, as the guy responsible for sourcing new equipment for both our contractor division and our commercial division, we have the exact opposite thing going on. The government pays us fairly and on time, we get exactly 7% profit over what we can prove we expended on government projects with a yearly audit, and any equipment even partially paid for by contracts has to be bought at contract end with a payback to the contracting agency. The commercial side, by contrast, is rife with wheeling and dealing and generally has far more budget per person to play with.
Many scholarship, grant, and other monies go unclaimed and unused for three reasons:
People are not aware of them or have not searched everything.
Some assume they are not eligible for anything and never apply.
Some are not willing to do the paperwork.
I am not making an accusation of anyone here, just pointing out some facts.
There are bizarro scholarships out there for left-handed folks, very tall people, and there’s even a Klingon scholarship of some kind. Also, individual campuses may have their own scholarship events and fundraisers going on at any given time.
Just sayin’.
FYI, everyone, here is something else that college students need to know:
Many colleges and universities have a health center on campus. They will have paid for part of it with their student fees. It functions much like urgent care–but the eligible student does not need insurance or even a co-payment to use it. The one on my campus is excellent but underutilized for several reasons:
Students are not aware of it/don’t know where it is.
They think it’s not a real medical clinic. (It is. It has real doctors and nurses, real medications at cheap prices, etc.)
They think their appointments or records will be made available to inquiring partners, fam, friends, or even professsors. (Not true.)
Think of the money that a college student could save by using this service instead of paying umpteen dollars to drive to the doc, make a co-pay, lose time, drive to the pharmacy, pay more money, etc.
