I like many of Bernie’s proposals and how he plans on paying for them. The only thing I am skeptical of is his ability to pay for “medicare for all”
I particularly like his idea to make state schools free. I would be perfectly fine with paying higher taxes for this but I think we can fund it just by eliminating federal financial aid to “for profit” colleges and by limiting some of the federal financial aid to private non-profit colleges.
Why should an NYU or Stanford student get federal financial aid under the same criteria as a student at Ohio state while a high school student at Andover gets nothing from the government while high school students at the local public high school pays nothing. Why have this disparity in how we finance high schools versus colleges? State colleges can still be selective (and would probably become more selective if they were all free) and private colleges can still collect tax deductible donations but their financial aid packages have to be funded from their own coffers.
Heck, I like a lot of his proposals and largely agree that he can pay for them (again with the exception of universal medicare; I also have problems with his treatment of fossil fuels and energy in general)
I known his proposal proposes that we impose a tax in financial transactions but we could use that money elsewhere.
The question I am asking is why we shouldn’t have free state school tuition and pay for it by savings on federal aid to for-profit colleges and non-profit colleges.
It depends on what you mean by “federal aid” to colleges.
If you mean Pell grants, that’s about $12B. These are need-based, so making state school tuition taxpayer-paid is going to increase the total spending by a lot, not "pay for it’. Likewise for subsidized student loans - the government pays for lower interest rates, but that does not cover anything like the total amount loaned.
In general, the Tax Foundation says that Sanders’ tax increase plan will bring in about $9.8T over ten years. Sanders’ wants to spend somewhere north of $18T over ten years. So, ‘how to pay for them’ is a good question.
I think the idea is that people will graduate from college with no debt, then immediately get jobs that pay much better than they could otherwise have found, and instead of repaying the loans they will pay increased taxes, and that will make up the difference. Sort of ‘buy at eight, sell at five, make up the difference on volume’.
I do not find Sanders’ proposals to be persuasive.
Here’s something I haven’t seen anyone discuss: why don’t we just borrow and go into more of a deficit to pay for them?
As we all know, the GOP doesn’t care about deficits, Cheney said as much when he was in charge, and ironically enough the GOP’s caring about the subject ebbs and flows with their control of the presidency. Fact is, debt isn’t a big deal as long as its not too much, and the US can afford to go into debt further if its for something as good as paying for college or health care. So I don’t care how Sanders pays for free college and free health care, I want those programs right now. We’ll borrow to pay for it but America will be better off because of it. A healthier and smarter population will create its own wealth and should be one of the few things no American should have problems with going into debt for
I mean everything other than tax breaks for charitable donations.
What if you stop federal aid to students attending private colleges? Why do private colleges get this benefit while private high schools do not? Because we provide free high schools so we don’t need to subsidize the private ones. Total tuition paid by state school students is about 67 billion/year. We can save that just by cutting off aid to other colleges, can’t we?
50% of money loaned to attend for-profit schools ends up in default. Private schools cost a lot more than public schools. I am not proposing to keep paying for the subsidy of private schools while paying the full ride for public schools.
Well that includes his health care plan which I still don’t understand how he pay for.
I think the idea is to make sate schools tuition free so that going to college becomes a question of ability to succeed and not ability to pay.
I know you only want to talk about the ‘free’ school thing, but I have a number of questions about his proposals. Quotes from your link:
So, doing the math here, if he wants to spend $1 trillion and proposes that will put 13 million back to work, that means that more than half of the money/loaded costs would be going just to pay for the people. Where will the money come from to pay for, I don’t know, the steel, asphalt and other construction materials and equipment to do the work? A $10 shovel for all 13 million is over $130 million alone after all. I’m also making the assumption that the 13 million jobs would include all the overhead, safety and training types, etc etc. The math doesn’t seem to work here.
Plus, you know, $1 trillion is like a lot of money even spread out over, presumably, 10 years. Not saying we couldn’t or even shouldn’t do it, just that it’s a pretty big ticket item and I wonder how realistic it would be to get through any Congress, let alone the ones we are most likely to have.
Ok, so I did a quick Google search on this, and according to this there are approximately 20 million students enrolled in colleges in the US in 2015. I don’t know what percentage of them go to public colleges verse private colleges, what percentage of them are coming here from other countries, etc, but at an average of $12k per year for tuition that’s over $240 billion. So, $75 billion seems a bit low to handle the load, and this doesn’t get into the shift from folks going to private schools to public if suddenly the education was ‘free’ (or whether those institutions could even handle the shift either way).
And, same issue…how realistic is it that he’d be able to get this implemented? I’m guessing not very, though perhaps more than the first one with the trillion dollar price tag.
The political third rail in US politics. I’ll just say ‘good luck with that’ and move on.
Jobs doing what? Also, wouldn’t this just be $5000 per ‘disadvantaged young Americans’, or am I missing a decimal point? That seems like a pittance, and that doesn’t even count overhead to run the program, which presumably wouldn’t be nothing. This one is really a wtf item as unless my in my head math is off it’s kind of ridiculous.
Ok…I think that’s not a terrible idea. How would he get it through though? You are going to have to force through legislature to make companies comply with this. And would it be across the board (i.e. would small businesses have to do this as well as large corporations) or would it just be for government employees? Government contractors?
No idea on this one…would need a lot more details about what these cuts are and why they are happening.
Notice there is nothing about nuclear here? So, to me it’s just lipstick on the same old pig.
Currently the national debt is something like 103% of our GDP. We spend about 6% of our budget on servicing the debt, which is expected to increase to about $1T per year. That means a trillion a year that we won’t have to spend on education or health care or anything else. Of course if we borrow a lot more, we will pay even more in interest. Something to keep in mind when we say "damn the consequences, I want free tuition and let my children worry about the bills’.
Spoken like a true liberal - I want it right now, and we will worry about paying for it later.
Still not clear. Do you mean eliminating all deductions?
That’s what I was talking about with Pell grants. What other federal aid do you mean?
Secondary education and post-secondary are different issues. How much money do we spend subsidizing private high schools, and how far will that go towards paying for free tuition at state universities?
I don’t know - can we? I would like to see your figures here.
I would like to see a cite on that. And again, how much money are we talking about?
AFAICT he won’t - his health care plans come up about $3T short IIRC. But the $18-19T is his whole spending plan, and includes health care.
I am sure that’s the idea. The question is, will it pay for itself, because of all the students who can’t attend college because they can’t pay for it who will graduate and pay enough in taxes to make up for it?
The free college for everyone thing really gets my goat, because money’s not the issue. The issue with colleges is that there’s a limited supply and growing demand. People wonder why college is so expensive, it’s because there’s not enough of it to go around. Throwing money at the students via loans or grants or government handouts just means colleges can raise their prices to absurd levels.
I did some quick match and estimated that my own state of Ohio has about 600 high schools. At an average 800 students per school (I looked it up), that’s almost half a million undergraduate students at any one time.
Ohio has 14 public universities, which means each one would have about 35,000 undergrad students if they were divided evenly. The only school that has more than that currently is OSU, which is the 4th largest school in the country in terms of undergraduate population (at 44,000).
Poor little Wright State would need to triple its undergraduate rolls if it wanted to pull it’s fair share of the massive number of new students waving government checks who it’s forced to enroll. The math just doesn’t work out; there aren’t enough colleges to go around. Build more. I’ve yet to see anyone talk about keeping college tuition costs down the only way that makes sense, by increasing the supply.
I like Bernie and all, but this part of his plan doesn’t fly with me. Fortunately he’s running for president and not emperor.
To be fair I think he is saying 1.3 trillion COULD create UP TO 13 million jobs. I think he might be talking about the knock on effects of creating that many jobs. Entire industries pop up to support all those workers. Food trucks aside, you also get more demand across the board for everything from houses to day care.
The number of slots are public school slots is pretty fixed. They would get more competitive but they wouldn’t absorb a lot of additional students. the total tuition currently being paid by those students is 62 billion/year. I think that’s just a statistic from the department of education.
Here is an article by the Atlantic that seems to explain my thinking better than I do. For-profit schools seem like particularly poor investments of our tax dollars. But I don’t see why we should subsidize NYU students when we already have several UNY schools in NY as well as a few public 4 year city colleges in NYC. Let them make do with the deductible charitable donations and their endowments.
ISTM that all he is doing is increasing the taxes collected from people making more than $250,000/year. If I were him I would just remove the cap and forget the donut hole and pay out full benefits based on lifetime income. So what if some banker ends up getting $50,000 social security checks, he will have paid in more than enough to justify that check and then some. It will seem more equitable and it will more fully fund the social security trust fund and it won’t seem like you are just trying to fleece the rich by increasing their social security contribution but giving them nothing in return. Lifting or removing the social security cap is popular among VOTERS on both side of the aisle (about 66% nationally). It is unpopular among Republican politicians and Democratic politicians from places like NY. Its bitterly fought because this is something they can and should lose on.
I don’t really know a lot about how effective these programs are but if they haven’t been effective to date then I don’t see why we should continue to pour money into it. If on the other hand they have been effective and poor young teenagers just don’t have the political platform to make their case for expanding this program then…
It would probably be easiest at the federal level and private companies will follow suit if (like most other places in the world) it seems to be a benefit that works for everyone.
I think he means to shore up the PBGC. We need better pension regulation in ERISA.
He doesn’t sound like he knows what he is talking about here. He only knows that there is a problem with global warming and here is something that could fix that problem and damn all the other problems that might arise.
There are lots of industrialized western countries which provide medicare for all; and they all do it at a substantially lower cost than the partial coverage U.S. system–and they provide better overall medical care than the U.S. (if you look at things like life expectancy and infant mortality rates).
If you made public universities free, why would anyone go to private colleges? Currently 90% of high schoolers go to public school and if you made college free then similar numbers should be expected for public colleges. That would be 18 million college students going to public schools. The average out of state student at a public college is charged $24K per year. The total cost of giving everyone a free education would be 432 billion dollars. The total current federal spending on student aid for college is $134 billion. That leaves 300 billion dollars a year in new funding needed. That is about $3,857 per year for each tax paying household in the US. I am glad you have an extra 4 grand to throw around, but not every taxpayer does.
This way underestimates the amount of money needed since making college free would attract many more students than the current 20 million.
The idea of the act is that if a multi-employer pension fund is going to run out of money, they can ask the government if they may reduce payments temporarily or permanently to a level no lower than 110% of the guaranteed benefit.
Bernie doesn’t think this should be allowed. Instead, he wants to set up a government fund to pay the benefits at the same level. This fund is to be funded (no doubt everyone will be astounded to find) by new taxes on the wealthy - specifically increasing estate taxes and taxes on (of all things) the sale of expensive art. Bernie thinks this will raise $29 billion, and thus cover the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp’s deficit, which is currently $62 billion. The arithmetic on this is not clear, what with the reduction to 110% and how $29 billion can pay a $42 billion shortfall.
Because our economy has a carrying capacity for debt and we don’t really have the right to burn up our credit limit and force our kids to live paycheck to fiscal paycheck.
Sure they do. They just forget they care when their guy is in office and is spending the money on the right things (tax cuts and defense).
Things like health care and education are not one shot items that we can finance today and pay off over the long run. It is a continuous and recurring cost that we pay every year. Paying for these with debt means that we will structurally go deeper and deeper into debt every year until we hit our credit limit. Paying for in state tuition at state colleges (which would be even lower than the $62.5 billion bill) with a gross up that out of state students pay in excess of the in state amount would force private colleges to drop their prices and make public colleges more competitive. College education would never be determined by ability to pay.
Health care is another area where goods don’t seem like they should be distributed based on ability to pay BUT, absent a good funding mechanism, it will collapse under its own weight in very short order.
Its not a one time payment. These programs will collapse under their own weight without a good funding source. We can probably self fund public college tuition by stopping the handouts to private colleges (give or take) but universal Medicare will require a tax increase or savings somewhere else in the system. That can be an increase in the medicare tax, death panels, negotiating drug prices, increase in cinome taxes, etc. But we probably cannot add additional structural load to our deficit without some sort of day of reckoning in our lifetime.
For the same reasons they do now, even though many private schools are more expensive; the prestige. A degree from Harvard still carries a lot of weight. The finest engineering students go to MIT (which is a private school, despite the state name) and are recruited from there into the finest companies.
You still get to deduct your contributions to your non-profit alma mater.
Federally subsidized loans. We should keep federal loans in place for students that need help with room and board.
The Atlantic article above seems to think we can get pretty close by cutting off private colleges from the federal trough.
I will have to get back to you on that. Note: I am talking about default (not default that occurs within 2 or 3 years of graduation); I don’t know if this number includes forbearance (you are in default but they just aren’t calling it default while you try and get your act together).
I’m afraid you may be right and we will need significantly better funding solutions (or cost cutting, perhaps death panels) to pay for universal medicare.
I recall study done by some think tank that concluded that government generally collects more in taxes for education up to 2 years of college than it spends. But I don’t propose we fund college tuition with the increased tax receipts from the higher earnings of graduates. I am not proposing that we build more state schools. I am proposing that we make the ones we have tuition free at the expense of federal funding and subsidization of private schools.
I didn’t think the idea was to provide college for everyone. I thought the idea was to provide a free college for those who are most capable of taking advantage of that college education. Private colleges would still exist but they would not be funded by the federal government. It might make sense to make the program more like Medicaid where the state has to pony up some percentage while the federal government pays the lion’s share.
Who says we are trying to give everyone that graduates from high school a college education? I thought the idea was that we would make state schools tuition free and that way there would be a large population of people who graduate from college with little or no debt.
The TP are the same people who were establishment conservatives before. They are simply angrier and dumber, but their philosophy is no different no matter what they claim. They claim to be mostly libertarian, but Rand Paul’s got no traction and their guy in this election is either a racist billionaire or a theocratic Texan. If they cared about deficits, they’d support Obamacare, they’d support Planned Parenthood, they’d support a myriad of low-cost preventive programs that help the poor instead of spending more money to incarcerate them later. Your typical tea partier is nothing more than a conservative pretending to be libertarian
Sorry, you don’t get to criticize debt being a conservative and likely supporting the spending of 2 wars on a credit card. Conservatives have zero relevancy and credibility in terms of debt, let’s just get that out of the way first.
As to what you said, in terms of debt, the US generates revenue far exceedingthat of interest payment. Now of course its gotta be taken under control, we don’t want it ballooning any more, but so long as revenue exceeds interest, we have years if not decades to fix the problem. You say “expected to increase” like it’ll happen next year. It’ll take a long time to happen and at the same time, revenue is rising too. Interest payments are not a worry and neither will adding to it in order to make everyone healthy and educated. Like I said, a healthy and educated society pays for itself.
Because liberals know that running a country is different from running a household. You can run a country on a deficit perpetually so long as your country is growing. Free college and health care, while absorbing an initial startup cost, will pay off in the long road, just like how Obamacare is saving America money and will save us billions in the future
Besides, its much better than what a true conservatives want: the poor to die off and the uneducated to be slaving away in factories for (non-guaranteed!) minimum wage with no way of ever moving up
College and health are things one should be going into debt to pay for. Plus, the country can absorb billions in debt so long as the country is growing, which we are. For the short-term cost of providing free college and health care to everyone, the deficit will pay for itself
The payment is not one-time but neither are the benefits. Savings will come from more competitive prices and a healthier work force. The country is growing, we’re not Japan or Russia with a negative population replacement rate. Even if our debt grows, our revenue will as well. And with healthier and smarter people come higher tax brackets. With a progressive tax plan in place, even if the rich are losing more money by percentage, there are a lot more rich people to pay for it. That day of reckoning will not come because people are smarter and healthier. Its more likely to come in our current system where the rich avoid taxes and owns the most wealth. THAT is what you should be arguing against
That is largely the result of selectivity. That may change if state schools become tuition free. It might take a while before U. Mass. becomes more selective than Harvard and MIT but it might not take that long before Berkeley become more selective than Stanford.
If UCLA became tuition free UCLA would probably become more selective than USC (they are about tied right now) within an election cycle.
Libertarian? Really? I know libertarians and the tea party is only partially influenced by libertarians (Koch money only goes so far). I thought they started as thinly veiled racists that later became a more general method for Republicans to disown George Bush as if they didn’t vote for him twice. A way for them to pretend that all the failures of the Bush administration were because he wasn’t a “true conservative scottsman” Its the conservative version of a mulligan.
No they won’t. I can’t think of a single country with single payer that isn’t struggling to deal with the burden of their health care system. Universal health care will provide a one time reduction in our health care costs but the slope of health care spending continues to increase faster than the GDP in every country. Eventually we HAVE to ration health care, increase taxes or make people pay.
Healthy populations are more productive but that is not what universal health care is meant to cover. If we really just wanted a healthier work force we would probably want to cover some preventative care but considering that the lions share of health care costs are consumed by people who are sick and not likely to ever recover, the argument is moral and not economic.
The drop in costs are a one time phenomenon. The economic benefits of a healthier work force does not come close to paying for nursing homes for everyone.
It has been a LOOOONG time since the growth rate of health care costs in ANY country exceeded its economic growth rate for any prolonged period of time.
I am not as concerned with obscene wealth as I am with obscene poverty and as the saying goes I would rather be unequally rich than equally poor. But I agree the wealthy seem to be rigging the deck increasingly in their favor and it is no longer the case where the rich get rich because they are more productive and take larger risks. They are in large part becoming rich because they are already rich. The benefits of owning capital have eclipsed the benefits of providing labor.
As far as avoiding taxes, how do you think the wealthy avoid taxes? Sure we can 9and probably should) tax them more but the bigger injustice is not how the tax code is set up but how the rewards of capitalism are split between labor and capital.