That sounds more logical to me, because then guy with 2 kids pays more than guy with 0 kids. I think where it fell apart for me is the idea that someone who has more than the “average” number should pay more (by which logic, someone who has fewer than average should pay less).
I can choose whether to avail myself of those services or not, and I can negotiate with other people offering similar services. I have more choice. I’m pro-choice.
But in actual fact, I believe they are already charging an amount to offset the cost of their education-- at least the part they they themselves paid for.
If you compare our public K-12 system, it doesn’t rank very well against those of other countries. But our post K-12 system is among the best, if not the best, in the world. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the latter is run much more by the private sector than the former is? Sure, we have some great state schools, but without our private colleges and universities, I don’t see how we could expect that system to be any better than our K-12 system.
Injecting more private involvement in the system is more than likely to improve the whole system. Now, I do believe that we should have compassion for the less fortunate ones in our society, and don’t just throw them to the dogs. But most people can do just fine taking care of things for themselves, and they will demand a better product if they do.
Miss E: As has already been pointed out, having children is optional. However, in the society we live in, it is quite difficult to function without a care. It is not at all difficult to function without children. I would argue that a car is much more important to your getting about the business of living than children are. Children, of course, are the source of great emotional happiness (most of the time 
), but that’s a different issue.
The only viability of this notion is to get rid of compulsory education. If we get rid of compulsory education, then we can let it all be privately funded by those who want to educate their children.
Why?
Because it’s unfair to expect someone to shell out money for what they can’t afford. If they can’t afford it, truancy is unenforceable because you’ll have to use someone else’s money, i.e. yours or fireclown’s to enforce the truancy laws by employing truancy officers on up to removing children from the homes of people who cannot afford to send their kids to school. By that time the price of supporting the punitive system for truants will cost the same amount in taxes as would just funding the schools to begin with.
Compulsory education works by the notion of economies of scale. It is cheaper because we are doing it in bulk and the price is distributed over a great number of people via property taxes. Wealthier people move to wealthier areas to get their kids into better schools. If this system were to be removed, then wealthier people would not bother with public schools at all, they would send their kids to private schools because the economy of scale as incentive would be removed. For the poor of the country the only option left would be to pay too much for a substandard school. So, if the state isn’t going to fund schools then it shouldn’t require that people utilize that service.
The reason Libertarianism doesn’t work is because you can’t do it piece-meal. You either have to go whole hog with it or don’t do it at all. There is a reason Federalism won out in this country, because armed individuals would have been overrun by invading powers within a few years of our existance. It was only with centralized institutions that we were able to maintain our existance as a cohesive nation.
(snip)
No, that’s part of the problem. A good example would be my parents who have had their property taxes increased over 100% over the course of the last few years because the surrounding area grew wealthier and wanted a “Good School”.
A person should have the option to make their home where they wish, without having to worry about compulsory taxes becoming prohibitively high due to the wishes of the neighbors. FTR my parents are huge supporters of education, and haring my father complain about the rising costs was very surprising.
Well like I said loans are always an option if you can’t afford something. But we expect people to pay for things that they cannot afford all of the time and a fair bit of it they don’t do. I highly doubt the migrant farm workers in this area actually have insurance on their cars, to continue the analogy.
But it still goes back to the choice to undertake the obligations that come with a decision, in this case with kids to feed, cloth and educate them. Is it unfair to require that parents do the first two? I imagine most people think it is, then I don’t see why it would be to do the third. We could use the same enforcement officers for all three and people would help out people who can’t pay for and education just like we help those who can’t afford food or cloths.
OK, I thought you were addressing your post to me, but I agree that if you don’t provide assistance to those who can’t afford to pay, then it would be bad policy to force everyone to pay for their kids education.
Back to my food analogy, we require parents to feed their children, but I don’t see the “economies of scale” argument being used to set up government run grocery stores. In short, I don’t buy that argument. If this system were used, there wouldn’t be any public schools for the wealthy to ignore, just as there aren’t any public grocery stores.
But you can propose policies that lean more in the libertarian direction than other policies do, and you will get at least some of the benefit the free market. We do that now at the college level (mostly private, but partly public), and it works much better than the K-12 system (mostly public, but partly private). And note that most State run Colleges do charge some tuition of the students, even if it doesn’t cover the entire cost of the education.
Our current system of publicly funded K-12 education was put in place when most Americans were not-so-well-educated farmers and factory workers. Some visionaries set up the system partly out of humanitarian motives and partly out of elitist notion that the masses needed to be educated so they won’t destroy society. And maybe they were right, at the time. We are now a nation of highly educated individuals, almost all of whom want the best education possible for our kids. It’s time to re-engineer the process for the society we have become, which is quite different than it was 100 years ago. I’m not so sure American parents back then placed that great a value on a full High School education. At the turn of the 20th century, only 10% of HS age children graduated from HS, and you can bet most of them were upper class to begin with. Kids were needed to work in the farms.
And yet, we accept the current system without questioning it simply because it is already there. We play silly games like “segregating” ourselves in better communities with higher taxes so the schools will be better. Why not just pay for this ourselves and live wherever we want? Most of us can afford to do so (with the money we would save in taxes). We don’t need to send this money to the government so that the government can turn around and give it back to us, with their cut taken out in the process.
As long as we make an effort to take care of those who truly need assistance, the majority of us can take care of ourselves. We give poor people food stamps to feed their children, we can afford to give them education stamps to educate their children. If you’re willing to let the free market take care of your kids nutrition, why not let it take care of their education? I don’t see any fundamental difference.
I don’t know how it works in Florida. How were those property taxes assessed?Doubling the taxes would require a votable resolution here.
Single people pay for marriage benefits. Rich people pay for welfare (OK, they don’t really, but they’re supposed to). Poor people pay for art shows attended by the rich. Doves pay for bombs. Hawks pay for diplomats. That’s the way the tax system works.
A couple of years ago, when same-sex marriage first became a national hot topic, my dad told me he would never support it because he didn’t want to pay for marriage benefits he didn’t have access to. He wouldn’t marry a man, he reasoned, so he shouldn’t have to pay into a system that rewards those who do. Then I reminded him that gays have been doing the same thing for him for decades.
Even though your prepositions are playing Musical Chairs, I think I got the gist of this sentence. Again: Would you want to be operated on by an uneducated surgeon?
So competent medical care is a negligible benefit, then? How about the education of the people who educated you? Was that negligible? Are you arguing that we’d be better off with an illiterate Congress?
Yes. Hence “woman/infant/child” programs and food stamps, which are taxpayer-supported. This is how we have so far prevented an epidemic of starvation death. Are you saying that we should opt for starvation death?
The OP is refusing to consider that the reason his society works, is because of the public education he’s helped to subsidize. He has yet to demonstrate any serious willingness to consider the ramifications of a society without public education. To wit:
About 9% of K-12 students were enrolled in private school in 2003 (cite) and 11% were enrolled from preschool to 12th grade in 2007 (cite). The median tuition for private schools in 2005-2006 was $16,970, up 16% from 2000-2001, and some schools charged as much as $30,000 (cite).
Since much of private schools’ funding comes from gifts, fundraisers, and public grants, $16,970 must be lower than the average cost of providing an education. We’ll call that $25,000; I think we’re still being pretty generous to the libertarian argument with that figure. Another generous estimation would be that the rise in the cost of educating the average child would raise only 35% by 2010-2011 if the childless stopped paying into the education system now–factoring in the increased demand and vastly decreased supply of decent education; the increased demand and vastly decreased supply of young, educated teachers; the increased demand and vastly decreased supply of school equipment, with manufacturers finding it more and more difficult to replace educated creative staff, etc. That would make the average cost of educating a child in 2010-2011 about $33,750. Considering that median household income was $44,389 in 2004 (cite), how many parents will be able to spend $33,750 on their child’s education every year in 2010, while the poverty rate and the number of Americans without health insurance rise annually (Ibid)? It would be unspeakably generous to assume that 25% of all parents could do this without accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional debt–keep in mind that many of the poorest parents will undoubtedly already be up to their eyes in other debt–which would further destabilize our economy. Which, in turn, would take another hit from the fact that only 25%–again, a generous figure–of the next generation would have a basic education (forget college, that’s a whole 'nother can of worms).
Of course, if you like the Soviet model of a society where the vast majority struggles to survive, the people don’t have the knowledge or means to enact change, and the economy is a cruel joke, this must be sounding pretty good to you by now.
How do you figure you’re not deriving the same benefit as the person who has 4 kids in the public school system? After all, the PARENT certainly isn’t getting anything out of it (directly, anyway). And you’d be hard-pressed to prove the children themselves are getting more out of it than you, as John Q. Citizen does over your or the child’s lifetime.
So what? I don’t know what this has to do with the topic at hand. You’re assuming the parents are getting something. It’s entirely possible that they only got a bill for higher education. And what if he ISN’T a lawyer? What if he’s the guy who fixes potholes on your street? You still haven’t proven that you don’t benefit from the education of the masses. The fact is, you do. Every day.
Again…so what? Do you interview each person who performs a service for you to determine if you can get your “money’s worth” out of them? You still haven’t proven that you dont (or won’t) benefit from the money you’ve paid in.
Property taxes have an allowable increase per year according to assesment of the value of the real estate. As more people moved into the area, and demanded a super high end public facility, the cost of the property skyrocketed. Since the increases came over the course of ten years or so, it didn’t require a resolution. It is a simple case of :"Mr. Smith your property has increased in value by 50k since last year, your new taxes are X ". A lot of people who had lived in their area for years had to sell because they couldn’t afford the new tax rates, even though they owned the property. Developers have a lot of pull down here, and often when they want to create high end communities, will use a sort of upscale encroachment to force out older residents.
I don’t have a cite,but some years ago I read an article in the Washington Post about retired seniors moving to Arizona and not wanting to pay local taxes to schools.After all,they said,their families lived hundreds of miles away.They have an amount of disposable income that makes them attractive to the local economy.However,the schools don’t have the funds for band uniforms or the little extra
s.Needless to say,the relations between the young and the old weren’t very good.
I’m single and middle classed(ahem),but I see the need to pour a little water back for a better society.
How much of that 100% increase was actually due to education? Sounds like there are other problems in that neighborhood.
No argument there. As to the percentage, I couldn’t begin to speculate, but I do recall my Dad saying that quite a large percentage of it was going to fund the building of the ritzy high and middle schools as well as the remodeling of the elementary one. FTR, that high school is better supplied than many small universities. I’m not opposed to taxes for education, but I DO feel that there ought to be a sort of baseline standard of quality that they pay for. Anything above that is up to the parents to fork out for. It doesn’t seem fair for everyone in a neighborhood to have to pay more taxes so that some families don’t have to pay out for a private school level of education.
I think your numbers are bogus. From the US Dept of Education statistics:
Now, thats 2003/04 and it’s average, not median, but it shouldn’t be so different.
And if there were more private schools catering to less affluent people, then you’d get less expensive schools.
:rolleyes:
It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t work like that… although I have a deep aversion for the present tax system…
Sometimes it does, as per the fuel tax we discussed above.
I think that if we, as a society, decide that all children should have a decent education, then we, as a society, should help pay for that education for people who can’t afford it. Asking people without kids to pay for the education of the kids of affluent parents is, IMO, mind boggling.
Just curious, are there any western nations without free education for all? To me it’s quite simple: society is well served by the system of free education for all and in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary it should be continued.
$4,300: Your figure for the average year of private elementary school.
$30,000: The Wall Street Journal’s purported highest tuition of any private PK-12 school.
(30000+4300)/2=12850
Incredibly unscientific, but then:
- I factored in a rough, but generously low, dimension of the cost of educating the average student not reflected in tuition. Keep in mind, I’m looking at this from a total-cost perspective, since the OP still wants a public education system to exist; presumably, the tax burden of those with children would be adjusted to meet the needs of the now-even-more-cash-strapped school system.
- I was projecting into the next decade, and again gave generous estimates of how little the cost of education would rise once the childless stopped paying into the system.
- I never claimed to nail the specific costs right on the head. My point was to show that it was reasonable to expect education costs to get well out of hand for the families that need education the most. Consider the monumental struggle it already is to educate the children on the bottom rungs of our society, even with everybody paying in.
- I didn’t expect a precise number, either, considering how little time I spent researching it. And I’m not going to pour a whole lot more effort into it, because I’m writing to some hoser like me on the Internet, not my Congressman. And I have my own educational goals to pursue, for that matter.
Where would the money for these dozens of new, inexpensive private schools for the poor come from? Oil magnates concerned about the needs of the American public? Bill and Melinda Gates can only do so much, and there are only so many Bill and Melinda Gateses in this world.
Yeah, I got a bit carried away there. OK, a lot carried away. In my defense, I was in a college library at the time, and, you know, education…ah, forget it. Sorry.