Why John Mace, you old softy! You DO believe in a social contract, don’t you? :eek:
Your approach sounds very much like the current U.S. health care system. Some people are so rich they can pay their entire medical bills out-of-pocket. A whole bunch of people fund their health care through insurance. A few are so poor or so uninsurable that the government has to fund their health care.
The result of this system is wildly uneven levels of service, healthy people with insurance complaining that they’re paying for sick people, and taxpayers complaining that they’re paying for their own health care, while also funding health care for people who don’t have insurance.
And how is this superior to the current method of a universal, tax-supported, public school system?
I’m guessing the parents are paying the lion’s share of those school taxes because their children are going to school in that district, and they live there just like your folks do. Your folks aren’t paying for that school on their own!
It does make me more than a little nuts to see one school get the good stuff while a school down the road doesn’t have decent books for the kids to crack. In that sense, I suppose people DO pay according to what they can afford.
Well, I never said I didn’t. But we all have different ideas about what’s in that contract-- on both ends. And by “both ends” I mean what we owe society and what society owes us.
The current system is already lopsided, but middle call parents often can’t afford to take advantage of the private schools system because they’re stuck paying taxes to the local school district. And the wealthier folks jigger the system, as I mentioned above, by segregating themselves in communities with better schools.
We are constantly told that the single most important factor in the quality of a school is parental involvement. I believe the best way to get people involved in something is to make them pay for it. Johnny’s parents are going to damn well know why Johnny can’t read if they have to write a check to the school every month.
John Mace Education stamps would be requiring people without kids to pay for the education of kids who are no theirs, so we return to the same problem.
Kids in poor areas would get shoddy educations at best. They’d get the education they’d be able to pay for. A great deal of the educational expense goes into the maintenance of the building, after that you have to pay for materials, and teacher’s salaries. The poor kids would get the worst of these. We require people to feed their kids, but we don’t require that they feed them well. No one is brought up on child abuse charges for feeding their kids nothing but Chef Boyardee and McDonald’s. What if a community cannot afford to build a school? What then? How do we enforce compulsory schooling?
For the law to be effective laws have to be enforceable. Compulsory schooling is not enforceable unless it is provided by the state.
…so, property taxes didn’t increase; the value of the property did. The tax rate stayed the same, right? Then I don’t see the issue…
But again, I don’t know the details in Florida. In Arizona, the legislature passed laws to stamp out so-called Taj Mahal schools in the rich neighborhoods. In fact, the state was fined millions of dollars because there wasn’t equity.
As far as the issue of the elderly not wanting to pay taxes, yeah. That was an interesting, ugly battle.
Well, the problem is that the property value sometimes increases way beyond what people who live there could have afforded to pay for the property in the first place. This has happened in my community, and it’s causing problems. People like my husband and I are starting to leave because they can’t keep up with the taxes anymore. While I agree that we don’t have the “right” to live there, it’s now becoming largely become a community of the rich and the poor, which I don’t think is very healthy.
In addition, with the housing market slowing down, some of these folks are having trouble selling. Therefore, you would think the value of the property is not as high as the last few years would have indicated, but the tax assessments never seem to go down with the market…only up.
Depends on what “the problem” is. I don’t buy into the OP’s thesis, so I’m defining “the problem” differently. And since he seems to have abandoned the thread, I don’t see that we need to stay within his boundaries. I’m looking at ways to make parents be more involved in the education of their kids and to stop subsidizing rich people. Those are the two problems I’m addressing.
It’s unclear to me that this is true, and even if it were true it’s unclear if the education they got would be any more “shoddy” than they’re getting now.
A grant from my local government paid for about 2/3 of my MS. I have absolutely no problem with helping pay for other people’s education. It’s part of my “pay it forwards”.
You got that exactly right. The previous generation paid for my education. It’s only right that I should help pay for educating the next generation, even though I may have no kids of my own.
I can’t understand why so many people seem to have a hard time grasping this.
Well, that’s not true. If the property value goes down, the tax assessment goes down. However, nobody in their right minds wants their property value to go down. And that does, heartless as it may seem, play into that idea I forwarded that if you don’t want to pay property tax, don’t own property. (I don’t really agree with that argument, incidentally; I give it the same credence as I do to the “if you don’t like what’s on television, don’t watch it” crowd, as if ignoring something you think is a problem makes the problem go away…but it *is * an argument). In any case, I’ll say again, the property tax rate didn’t increase…the percentage remained the same, at least. And either way, the schools didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, although they benefited by it in some cases, yes.
As an aside, it’s funny…not a whole lot of people complained when the value kept going up and up and people made a killing…only it’s an issue now. (And yes, of course, I know there will be a chorus of “I wasn’t like that” or whatever…that’s fine).
Depends on whether or not they ever intend to sell or move. No one wants to be forced out of their homes because the noveau-riche decide that their neighborhood is just So quaint; and wouldn’t it be just perfect if we built our Mc.Mansion here? It happens in more places than you think. Why should someone get forced from their property because the surrounding area becomes affluent? A goodly portion of those local taxes are going to pay for the fancy high-tech school that the affluent new buyers are demanding.
To clarify my other point, suppose that the cost of the private school’s tuition is 10k a year. The users of the system profit by increasing property taxes so that they only pay 500.00 more a year and get nearly the same level of education. Net savings of 9,500.00 for them. Those who derive no direct benefits from the system now have to pay 500.00 more for an upgraded service that they do not utilize or want. Why? simply because changing demographics dictate the wants of the new locals.
Right, but property assessments often don’t happen often enough to reflect real value.
I think it’s a good argument for most things. But in this case, it’s not a valid one because everyone pays property taxes, whether directly or indirectly. If taxes go up, rents will increase.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the schools. Although it is annoying when the taxes go up and the quality of the schools goes down, which is what is happening in my town. I strongly suspect the loss of the middle class is a major contributor to this phenomenon.
It’s not a matter of not being like that, it’s more about what you bought your house for. We bought ours with the intention of living in it for many many years. We fully want and expect the value to go up over the next, say, 30 years. We did not necessarily want or expect the value to double in 5 years’ time…what good is that if we aren’t planning to sell? If we were planning to flip it after a few years, sure we would have been thrilled…but then taxes are just part of the price of doing business.
Maybe because some people think that the previous generation shouldn’t have had to have paid for your education in the first place. I don’t think anyone has a hard time grasping that you believe they should have. But that statement, as it stands, is an opinion with only a very weak supporting argument-- that things done in the past are the way things should be done in the future. Or that things done in the past were somehow “correct” or “the best way”. Or that debts are carried on into the next generation, in exactly the same form as they existed in the past.
As for Nava’s statement, no one (certainly not me, anyway) is arguing that she should be disallowed from paying it forward as she sees fit.
It’s a big leap to go from: There exists a social contract to People should help pay for the education of families who can well afford to pay for it themselves.
But the OP wasn’t asking about the children of well-to-do families. He was asking about all children. And frankly, his underlying attitude seems to be, “Okay, I got what I wanted, why the hell should I have to give anything in return?”
Society doesn’t exist simply to protect your rights and provide you with a comfortable existence.
Maybe I’m just stupid, John, but aren’t rich people paying more taxes? In both our countries, income taxes are progressive, and property taxes are more or less based on property value, which is strongly correlated to personal wealth. It seems virtually inevitable that rich people will in fact subsidize everyone else, in any place with a progressive tax system.
Adding on the “poor people get education stamps” system strikes me as being a way to potentially ADD to the complication, expense, and government waste of the system. I’d like to simplify taxation, not complicate it with a wholly new way of doling out money based on some income formula that will create more dodges and perverse incentives.
Now that…that’s just weird. Of course, funding for schools **may ** stay constant even if taxes go up, as opposed to a **percentage ** of property taxes being used to fund education. Every state, obviously, does it different.
You bring up a good point, and I was even thinking about adding something to that post along the lines of: Well, we might argue that it all evens out since rich people tend to pay more in property taxes anyway.
I really shouldn’t have talked about subsidizing the affluent, because that probably doesn’t happen all that often. But how about subsiding the “comfortably middle class”? I think that happens an awful lot.
There are two issues here:
Whether or not a fee-for-service system is the way we should run our education system.
Frankly, I think much of what the government does should be handled that way. You get to keep your own money and use it the way you want. Some things, like a police force or fire department or a court system, lend themselves to being paid for out of the general fund, but many things don’t. I believe education is one of those things that don’t require a government monopoly. Most people simply can’t afford to send their kids to private schools because they are already paying for the public schools.
How best to administer the schools system.
I’d like to inject more parental choice into the system and get the state out as much as possible. We could use something like vouchers to give parents more choice, and yet have everyone still chip in to finance the education of the young. But if parents had to literally write a check to their kids school every month, they would be more incentivized, IMO, to get more involved with the school. Paying indirectly, through taxes, often makes it hard to know how much we’re paying for something.
I don’t know how things are done in Canada, but you would be hard pressed to create a system more complex and with more dodges and perverse incentives than the one we have in the US. Tying educational funding to property taxes creates plenty of distortions, and the educational bureaucracy is famous for waste and mismanagement here. Especially in CA, with prop 13. And as bad as prop 13 is, I can understand why it passed, since the previous system was just insane. But my neighbors literally pay 1/10 the property tax I do simply because they’ve lived in their house for so long. Had they bought an identical house today, they’d be paying maybe 5x what I pay (I’ve lived in my house awhile, but not nearly as long as they have).
It goes deeper than that. It’s how we’ve been doing it for generations, yet there still isn’t enough funding to adequately educate all of our children. There’s no logical way to get from here to an adequate school system by taking away funding. It’s even more ridiculous than NCLB, which has as its explicit goal the removal of funding from schools that really, really need it.
Of course, the OP argues that America should be a predominantly uneducated country, or at the very least, a more classist society than it is today:
If you (general “you”) truly believe that America is short on people with no job skills, and we need to produce more of them by eliminating school funding, that’s a whole 'nother GD, and there’s nothing I can do to reach you. The concept is so absurd on its face that I, for one, have neither the patience nor the skill to deal with it. I can’t help the feeling that anyone who truly believes that schools need less funding is out to sea, and bears the burden of proof for rallying against something that is simply not controversial.
That’s the other key here. Many of the rich (and comfortably middle-class) are already experts on dodging tax obligations, due in part to their ability to pay for gray-market accounting services. The poor don’t have such resources, so I can’t see how this would account to anything other than yet another nationwide stick-up of the people who can’t afford it.
First of all, if the government were the most cost effective and efficient way of providing goods and services, we’d have a socialized economy. But it isn’t. There is no reason to think that you wouldn’t get a better product from the market. As I noted earlier, compare the US’s (largely public) K-12 system and (largely private) College/University system. The former doesn’t rank well against the rest of the world and the latter is top notch. Why do you think that is? Luck?
Secondly, it’s not clear that you’d get less spending on education if you privatized the system. You might get more spending, but most of us could choose exactly how much we wanted to spend. People are often hesitant to vote for tax increases, but they often aren’t hesitant to spend money on their kids. The funding mechanism is too far removed from the consumer that price information is lost in the process. I suspect that very few people know how much of their money is going into the educational system today.
As long as we have a system to take care of the disadvantaged, there just isn’t a good justification for socializing the education system. We’ve seen that private schools do an excellent job of educating kids. And if you’re going to socialize something, you need a really, really good reason for doing so. For instance, there is a extremely good reason for socializing the military. Just look at Iraq, where private militias are tearing that country apart.