I said it primarily benefits smart, middle class, white kids. Your nice info graphic, made my point. Significantly more (42% of white kids vs 34% minority kids) are enrolled in college. Whites are still a majority in this country so eliminating debt does primarily benefit them.
I’m sympathetic to helping kids with student loans who didn’t get a degree far more than those who do have a degree.
I still question the wisdom of spending our limited resources to help out the college kids vs spending money to help the majority of folks who don’t go to college. For the price of eliminating a single colleges kid median debt of 40K here is what we could do instead. We could double the WIC program spending which provides food for young mothers (primarily single mothers) and their children. Right now the program spend just over $100/month. If we double the assistance which would among other things allow us to increase the voucher for fruits and vegetable from the current $11/month to something like $80/month. The assistance is typically for 4 years until the kid is ready for pre-school or kindergarten. So it would cost roughly $1200 or $5K for 4 years of additional funding. Meaning we could help 8 mothers for what it cost to forgive one student loan.
The chance of somebody with a college education living in poverty is around 4% (and damn near zero if you have a degree from a top school) The chance that single mom is living in poverty is 35%.If we really want to help inequality it seems pretty clear which group needs more help.
I really don’t think this is the problem. There’s a chart that has been posted in this thread many, many times, which shows how the wealth from productivity gains has been shared between capital / management and labor. That chart is the problem. Everything else is just choosing colors for the walls of our cells.
Now, I am sympathetic to the argument about how consumer choices have changed, but in my view that’s more about what counts as productivity in the first place. Is an entire mountain range of discarded shiny plastic disks productivity? Is a nearly-useless CD player? Is a cheeseburger and its paper foil wrapper? I dunno.
Banzai
1830
The gains from worker productivity don’t go to the workers, they go to the shareholders and upper management.
Hey workers, go do more with less so the stock price continues to go up. No? You’re fired.
antlers
1831
Thanks for those links-- hadn’t thought about student debt in those terms.
I think the middle class lifestyle has gone up but a lot of that is due to two working parents now. In my parents’ generation most moms stayed home with the kids. Now middle class people want the McMansions.
I don’t see that being the case in PA. The McMansion thing.
Maybe among baby boomers, but not among Gen X or Millennials.
I just want to be able to pay off my student loans, pay off my mortgage, put money in my retirement, house and feed my kids, pay for insurance and save for their college education
Of the 6 things listed, 4 of them have steadily been going up faster then inflation. Actually, house prices have also being going up faster, it’s just interest rates are low, so it doesn’t feel like it as much.
Everything that impacts the middle and working class has rapidly gone up in price, while the things that general impact the wealthy have general stayed the same, or gone done in price.
Nesrie
1834
No it does not prove your point. A disproportionate amount of that debt goes to non-whites. If you read the articles you would see the debt is tilted against non-white students and therefore addressing the debt would not “primarily” help just the privilege. The privileged kids might even have many to pay for college and don’t need debt. Only 56% even get debt. We’re talking about student debt here not just going to college. And if you read even more of those articles, the non-whites and women are saddled with the debt… longer. The effect of debt is not just handed out to white kids, and it’s super disingenuous to try and suggest that is what that information says.
SlyFrog
1835
Well, I mean, that only makes sense. When your group has all the resources, it isn’t surprising that your group can use its resources to finance intellectual capital accumulation like going to university. It’s basically a rich get richer system, but by race.
What is interesting about this is the amount of people who bitch about minorities getting everything for free. I know people who basically believe that 90% of minorities pay nothing for college, etc., because of all the government handouts, scholarships, etc. (It’s another Republican shibboleth, along the lines of “All those people on disability don’t deserve it, except of course for that one uncle of mine, he does.”)
This information pretty much shows that for the lie that it is.
Nesrie
1836
Yeah it’s the kind of misinformation that spreads easily because for some reason a lot of people want it to be true… like somehow if it were true it alleviates them from addressing all these other issues so they don’t have to feel bad for a minute. No one wants people to just feel bad though. We just need tools and ideas that actually address the issue. If they want to feel bad on their time, so be it.
Minorities and women are more likely to get debt when they go to college, and they take longer paying it off. You don’t just ignore that problem because white students also have debt.
We’re gonna need more walk to put people up against again.
And he’ll consider voting for DJT if the ‘wrong’ Democratic candidate gets the nomination. Great job by you, Bill.
Quaro
1840
He’s 100% saying of course I will vote for Warren over Trump (ie, i will vote for the more professional candidate even if I disagree on policy’, I think these headlines are terrible:
Yup, he sure does. Gates has been thinking about this a long time. His dad was one of most vocal supporters of retaining and expanding the estate tax, even before Bill was a billionaire.
One of the first things that Bill says we should do is " tax labor the same as capital."
AFAIK, the only candidate who is out saying this is Joe Biden. His proposal analyzed here is actually quite good.
Eliminate the lower capital gain tax for those making a $1 million a year or more. (I’d personally go further and eliminate the capital gains rate period for all income). Joe’s plan also eliminates the step-up basis for assets upon death.
The overall effect is it would basically double all billionaires taxes overnight. It would also double the taxes of virtually all wall st types, such as hedge fund managers. It would substantially raise the tax rate of most CEOs.
It would also create a wealth tax of roughly 40% for estates over $10 million, passed to family members.
What I particularly like about is the secondary consequence. I’ve spent a lot of energy over the years trying to convert ordinary income into income that could be taxed as long-term capital gains, deferring income and other ways mininizing my taxes. There is a small army of smart finance types who’ve spent their entire career developing schemes. If we eliminate any preferential treatment for capital gains and move to treat all compensation as taxable income, we not only help income equality but harness the brainpower of those finance types to do things that are useful for society and not harmful.
ShivaX
1842
Yeah, I’m down for all of that. Capital gains being some magical category has been a rich man’s way to avoid taxes my whole life.
Whatever else you think of Warren’s proposals, at least they have had the effect of producing a groundswell of support for more aggressive taxation on the wealthy. All of these ideas are good. I think we need all of them and a direct wealth tax, but if we get only some of them from a Democratic administration, and if we continue to see widespread public support for them, it will be a gain for the country.
Alstein
1844
The biggest vote-winner for Dems will be demonizing billionaires. No one will ever have sympathy for billionaires.
Dems need to just outright wage class warfare at this point and give Dems red meat the same way Republicans use bigotry as their red meat.
ShivaX
1846
I just saw a crazy bordering-on-alt-right guy who I went to highschool with on Facebook that was bitching about how rich people aren’t taxed enough and they’re fucking over everyone else. It’s an angle that has legs and broad appeal at this point. Hell, it was a big part of Trump’s appeal, let’s not forget. Trump campaigned on “the system is broken and rich people run it, but they can’t buy me”. Which of course was horseshit, but people voted for him off of it. Drain the Swamp and all that.
Populism has always been effective and now that the GOP has let loose that demon and fed it non-stop… I think a restrained populism could be a winning message for the Democrats. There was a reason they basically ran everything from WW2 until Reagan: because they were party of the common person. Then Clinton came in and got into bed with Wall Street and they turned away from that (again a point that was used by Trump and his Minions against Clinton: she met with Wall Street people).
Of course the danger of it is significant, but as long as we don’t let some Left version of Trump in, odds are we’ll be fine. Saying we should go back, say, to tax rates under Reagan had isn’t exactly Marxism.
The DLC and their awful Vichy Left movement are a reaction to Reagan. Reagan is a more effective (at achieving his literally evil goals) Nixon. Nixon and the modern GOP only sniffed federal power after transforming their party to be explicitly racist in the wake of Civil Rights.
Stop ennobling this bullshit. It’s just racists all the way down.
Fuck the lot of them.
