daoneandonly wrote: It's a matter of what should be "free" in question. Obviously nothing in life is free, but what should fall in the umbrella of rights and just handouts is where I'm driving at. Health insurance sure, but I have yet to hear any Democratic candidate come up with a fair and sustainable solution of how we achieve that. College is not a right, hence the onace should not be on the tax payer. Community college, sure, there's an argument for that, but is community college really that expensive where its breaking people's backs?
'Onus' by the way. Like bonus.
Well the point of the Warren plan on college was that publicly funded universities should be free. State colleges, community colleges etc. Why should the public dollars be funding a for-profit education mill that is not accessible to all who qualify? If we want hard working poor people to bootstrap their way into the middle class, this seems like a smart way to do it.
(Leaving aside where the money goes to. If we bitch about welfare for a struggling mother who can't pay to feed their kid, why should we pay billions in welfare handouts for state universities to have bloated athletic departments? Where the NCAA makes billions in profit from uncompensated athletes but the public dollar funds the departments in the first place. Why not at least pay for her kid to have child care and her to get a scholarship to attend that public university for free. You've seen the eight figure salaries that coaches command on the public dollar. Why should we pay that instead of a stipend or scholarship for continuing education for the striving class?)
The fix is easy, have a flat tax, or at the very least, a 2 maybe 3 tier tax system where the deltas between the tiers are maybe 3%. is it really fair that a difference in income of $1000, hell even 5K, can put someone in the 22% threshold while the other still sits at 12? No, there shouldnt be these ridiculously imbalanced tiers that favor certain income brackets
But at least you agree that health insurance should be free, and so should possibly community colleges, and someone would need to pay for that.
The Warren plan pays for it by a 2% tax on billionaires and a 1% bump on people whose wealth is $50 million or higher. What you are proposing is the opposite, a reduction in taxes for the very very wealthy, and shifting the tax burden to poor people and the middle class. reasonable people can disagree on who and how. Seems to me smart to think that the upper tier can bear that burden a little better.
Would you cede that there are probably people who know how best to balance the ridiculously unbalanced tiers? Like what if it were a steadily graduated slope, so you wouldn't have a sudden jump from one tier to the next. I have been on that dividing line. Sure that sucks. OR WHAT IF economists looked at the tax scale and compared with with how money is spent and came to conclusions on what is a reasonable and fair way to make it work?
Because some very smart people have made it clear that in some cases the tax burden is proportionately heavier on those who can least afford it. And that your plan increases that burden significantly and makes the people who most need help instead have to pay the most in real life terms, That at the highest levels people are not choosing between buying food for their kid and paying a light bill. Or eating and going to college.
Rich people tend to stay rich, poor people tend to stay poor. That's in the numbers. But this country built itself as an economic powerhouse when we had a growing middle class. Middle class people spend money instead of hoarding it, and that makes for more jobs in general. Start-up businesses, homes bought and sold, etc. Seems to me we want programs that encourage people to make it to the middle class and stay there.
Education is a right for little kids, and high schoolers, but what is education for?
To prepare people for adult life. Right?
We do need educated adults, and in this economy things get more and more difficult and require higher levels of smarts to do whatever jobs the robots can't (yet) do. That's the only way to remain relevant on a global economy.
So as a civilization why would we want to fall behind other countries in educating our people? Schools that accept public money should be free for anyone who has the ability to do the work. Nobody is saying Harvard and Yale should be free. But why am I paying for the University of Maryland to have a team full of lacrosse douchebags? What are these entitled bros going to do with those killer LAX chops once they graduate and move on? I'm not watching a pro LAX league. They do nothing for me and their mummy and popop already have jobs lined up for them in investment firms when they graduate anyway. F them. I'd rather my money go to make sure a girl who has a biochemistry talent can afford her $700 text books so she can learn to grow new retinas in a nutrient rich fluid so I can have 20/20 vision and not have to lose reading glasses all the time. Right?
And AOC is the queen of self interest. She had a job that paid minimum wage because thats what it warrants with all due respect, yet she feels that job is entitled to more, and make no mistake she still has many friends in that field that she wants to hand these things out to.
It's not self interest to say: I've been there, I feel the pain. You yourself had a revelation that health insurance is critical, and it changed your opinion. AOC was blessed with smarts and good looks and passion and an opportunity that lifted her out of the minimum wage into the six figure career of public politics. And in looking around she sees how few people from the working class make it into power. So she says: these people are not being served by the political class the way corporate interests are. If Democracy means anything it is that We the People should have a say in how our lives are run. But right now politics serves Big Money first, since in general unless you get exceedingly lucky like her, you cannot get elected without making the giant corporate donors and lobbyist happy. They pay your election campaign and expect to have influence on policy. The average three-job working schmoe has no input or say. He just votes for a candidate who someone else selected and said he gets to pick between.
I would suspect the policies that AOC would write or vote for would better benefit you the working guy compared to the politics-as-usual sort that the big-money donors would give you to pick between. Like Hillary, say. Eff her. And Trump as well, may he feel the full weight of his actions when his karma comes around.
If I were you I'd look a little deeper into the actual policies proposed by these people instead of listening solely to conservative media. Or any media. Big corporations have a vested interest in you picking the wrong fight. You have good instincts to say someone is trying to screw me, but its not the people that they hold up as enemies of America.