a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

that's fair. but my point has more to do with the value system behind guaranteeing a universal than the policy question of how it's paid for. the article already confuses the two, i think, trying to draw both out of hillary's sentence and trusting that together they somehow prove she's more "progressive." there are huge gulfs between how we pay/could pay for these various things, but the idea that they should be universal is a different order of question. closer to philosophical. kinda like the "is this is a fundamental right, or not?" type question.

Means-testing costs money. Like, a lot of money, usually more than would be saved, makes programs more vulnerable to cuts in the long run, adds beaurocracy, hassle and resentment to what could otherwise be a simple and direct public service. It saves money, time, and social friction to send rich kids (along with everyone else) to school for free. It just requires realizing that "giving" things to people who don't "deserve" them is often good policy.

This is all imo and might be dumb soft-headed socialism, which I'm prone to, but it isn't as simple as "free shit for everyone wooooooooo
"

well is it more important that everyone goes to college or is it more important that everyone goes to college for free, cuz those are not the same thing. Maybe there's an order of priority here, and Clinton's priveleging the former over the latter with her crack about Trump's kids.

xp

points about means testing and universal rights make sense tho

sanders's bill has to do with tuition at public universities btw. are we really assuming rich kids wills top wanting to go to harvard? yes, there are huge question marks attached to this and it probably needs to be fleshed out a lot from his plan as far as i know it, which seems to be huge block grants to the states to pay the tuition, combined with requirements that the states maintain their existing funding, while bringing the cost of tuition down anyway by rolling back recently-ballooned cost increases. that latter part sounds like a serious headache, or fifty serious headaches. maybe the logic is that it puts the pressure back on the states and their legislators, as their constituents start saying "you mean to tell me you're going to throw away billions in free tuition money, making me foot the bill, because you're not willing to cut the president's salary" etc. etc.

obviously there are lots of ways for this to backfire or produce other problems. also lots of ways that it gets compromised down from "free for all" to something more modest but still radically improving the balance of wealth and opportunity in the country. i mean, 50% off tuition for all would be earth-shaking.

the big block of money is supposed to come by "imposing a Wall Street speculation fee on investment houses, hedge funds, and other speculators of 0.5% on stock trades (50 cents for every $100 worth of stock), a 0.1% fee on bonds, and a 0.005% fee on derivatives." i know nothing about wall street so i'll leave it to someone else to determine whether that is viable but it's not just some kind of phantom promise of goodies for all and "oh but he hasn't told us how he'll PAY for these things!"

wapo article is total garbage, but that's not too surprising.

hillary's line seems pretty demagogic and dishonest; even if you forced every billionaire to pay for his own kids' college, health care, etc., there are fewer than 550 billionaires in the united states.

are we really assuming rich kids wills top wanting to go to harvard?

why don't we all spend some time learning about how tuition works at places like Harvard before saying shit like this

https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator

haha it isn't def demagogic and I noted upthread that I assumed it was a misrepresentation of Sanders' proposal at least to some degree

But as a rhetorical tactic you can see how Hillary's "I want to help people who NEED it, not give things away to those who already have it" might have legs

I mean it IS def demagogic

sorry

xxp

Well this is fun:

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/hillary-clinton-foundation-state-arms-deals

Did not realize Goldman Sachs also benefits from U.S. State Department arms export approvals.

$29 billion just think of how many fighter jets that could buy public schools.

i'm biased, in any case. i got my undergraduate degree in large part thanks to a free college tuition for all program in georgia. i want to be clear that this is not a progressive program, as all the money comes from lottery ticket sales, and indeed there is no income cap on eligibility. you do have to maintain a B average, which also suggests problems given the differential advantages of kids from different school districts, and how likely it is that some will be overwhelmed early on. and obviously there is still the question of how you pay for everything besides tuition, plus some serious psychological pressure on students who are at the cusp of potentially losing the scholarship. nonetheless: it's a free tuition program for all, that does not require magic, or pies in skies. so it's not like it's a fantasy idea that american soil will never be able to accommodate. i never met anybody riding a limousine to class but i'm sure some rich kids do go there. hasn't really been a problem except possibly in driving up concert prices to unheard-of levels.

now, UGA charges $11,622 a year in tuition and fees. after that's wiped out by the state government, they guesstimate that if you live in the dorms and eat only at the dining hall, you'll need another $13,500 a year to get through college. that's not chump change, of course! but knocking out that tuition must change the financial picture for so many people. if you moved into a reasonable off-campus place and got a part time job, i think you could get through for around $35,000 out of pocket or in loans. if nothing at all goes wrong.

incidentally i do believe this program also incentivizes the state to keep an eye on school expenditures and make sure tuition is not skyrocketing for no good reason, because they don't want to get milked. the UGA in-state tuition point seems to sit right in the middle of the national extremes - around $4,500-5,5000 for the ten cheapest schools anywhere, $17,000-ish for the ten most expensive. on the other hand it may introduce perverse pressures to cut costs that you really shouldn't, but colleges create those pressures internally anyway because administrators and flashy star presidents want to look like they're doing things to justify their own inflated salaries. nonetheless: no pie, no sky. just shift the funding stream from lottery tickets to wall street tax and we're looking pretty good.

xpost to DJP - i'm not quite sure i catch your point, my apologies. i'm definitely not saying only rich kids can go to harvard, which i take to be your point in linking the page about financial aid. just saying it wasn't clear to me how covering all public school tuition is going to mean trump's kids becoming lucky duckys on the workingman's dime. his kids all went to private schools: the donald junior and ivanka went to upenn, tiffany is there as we speak, and eric went to georgetown. so hillary's one-sentence game-changer actually makes no sense, unless we assume that if sanders's law had been in effect, all of them would have chosen public state schools instead. knowing what little i know about the trumps, i... kinda doubt it? for the record i was able to work this out in five minutes with the aid of a well-illustrated puff piece from business insider; you'd think someone writing for the washington post could do at least that much work before hitting "submit."

you'd think someone writing for the washington post could do at least that much work before hitting "submit.

this is the newspaper that pays George Will and Charles Krauthammer, so no

Michael Gerson!

also: click$$

$29 billion just think of how many fighter jets that could buy public schools.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 10:25 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if its an f35, maybe like 1/2

Inner city schools would, of course, get hand-me-down fighter jets from the National Guard, while suburban schools would get French Mirages.

when i went to school all we had was paper planes, and we liked it

btw at my work-study job at the UGA libraries we ultimately determined that the smoothest, finest flight could be achieved with legal-size paper. regular printer paper was okay, but coverstock (not cardstock) had the best balance). a particular empty paper box was kept containing the department's covert air force, in case of emergencies. we also did useful things that better justified our $6.50 an hour or whatever it was.

http://thepeoplescube.com/images/various_uploads/Bombs_Bake_Sale_Circle_290.jpg

Amiright?

when i went to school all we had was paper planes, and we liked it

― Gorefest Frump (Doctor Casino)

no one on your corner had swagger like you

well, i assume rich kids had things like this

https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8301/7911382284_972debc6a4.jpg

Means testing obviously comes with a threshold too, with a sticker attached reading "hammer here for free cash and toughguy points"

Jeb Bush Should Face Facts: It's Time To Drop Out

As though his mother would ever let him quit.

Jindal wants to reduce the number of tax brackets to 3 and have the lowest bracket pay a 2% rate, eliminate all deductions including the estate tax and the AMT, but keep the mortgage interest deduction. This guy really, REALLY hates poor people.

the Jeb article is written by the presumably otherwise-useless son of a Cato Institute tax nut who quasi-championed newt in 2012 and whose current candidate or two you should be able to intuit from who he doesn't attack in this piece. a few months ago he wrote an article about Jeb's socialist roots. next.

his mom is peggy noonan btw

Whew, that 11 minutes of suspense was really killing us.

You mean ignorance, but ok

i'm sure you also knew that the EIC of the Daily Beast is a former Giuliani speechwriter married to the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover

https://despaciocerebrito.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/tell_me_more.jpg

I learned the other day that Nancy was Reagan's widow!

Wow, there are still great-granddaughters of Herbert Hoover alive today.

In the future, we will all be great-granddaughters of Herbert Hoover for 15 minutes.

Herbert Hoover didn't have many great-granddaughters, but every one of them started a band.

When Katherine Weymouth became publisher of the Washington Post, we had a brief moment of whoa, noting that her aunt was in Talking Heads.

this talk amongst yourselves is quite convincing in demonstrating a full understanding and complete lack of nerves consequent of my demonstration that you were snowed by a son of the ideological-idee-fixe arm of the anti-tax cohort of the power elite masquerading as some hipster-bearded young thing writing for a millennial-ish and totally objective news/analysis website

jeb ain't going nowhere btw

jeb has too much money on hand to go anywhere

thanks cap

yo is it true ilx got sonned by a snowman after a gabbjeb beef?????

Wait, are you saying Snowden is running?

Yeah, if Jeb's name were anything but Bush his poll numbers would have consigned him to oblivion.

however, I'm starting to think that the Cuban American hat rack has a bigger chance.

xpost Is that really true? 8-10% in a very crowded field isn't a sign of a super strong candidacy but it's not "oblivion" IMO. I mean this is a race that includes George Pataki and Santorum still hanging around at, like, 0.5%. Maybe that's setting the bar way too low but given that everyone expects at least one of Fiorina/Trump/Carson to flame out in the coming months, there's a lot of the pie to get spread around. Perhaps one could say that in another race, these poll numbers would consign someone to the "not gonna win, but no reason to expect they won't hang around forever" seat. After the 2012 nomination, every one of these people have to be thinking that they could have their big surge still to come, at some lucky point in the field, and if they play their cards right they have half a chance. It admittedly makes more sense for people like Kasich who have something to gain from a major improvement in exposure on the national stage, or who would conceivably view the VP nod as a career move. That doesn't apply to Jeb!.

i still find him a complete lightweight, the gop's john edwards, but yeah it's him or jeb and it's kinda hard to imagine it's jeb now. am i crazy or is rubio the worst case scenario for hillary?

Rubes has yet to demonstrate that any Hispanic except surly old Cubans will vote for him.

at the same time i could totally see jeb in that surprisingly floundering campaign that manages to turn it around by the time the actual caucuses and primaries start a la kerry and mccain

I admit that I was completely on the Bernie Sanders train until I heard him say "free college for all".

That's about the time he had the conductor throw me off