5 ms·

The systematic erosion of public education in the United States doesn't serve anyone in the United States' long term interests, except maybe the religious right

The systematic erosion of public education in the United States doesn't serve anyone in the United States' long term interests, except maybe the religious right (who don't matter that much in the federal government). It just doesn't serve monied interests. It doesn't help big oil, it doesn't help big pharma, it doesn't help the legal or medical professions, it doesn't help finance, or insurance, or banking. So I'm a little puzzled. Who does it benefit? I share the author's bewilderment in the face of the realization that this is, in fact, terrible for universities, and (seemingly, given what we know) not just weird news spin-doctoring or scare mongering: "Given the existential risk to American higher education, why didn’t I blog about this earlier? ... It’s simply that I didn’t believe it—even given all the other stuff that could “never happen in the US,” until it happened this past year... Surely even the House Republicans would realize they’d screwed up this time, and would take out this crazy provision before the full bill was voted on? Or surely there’s some workaround that makes the whole thing less awful than it sounds? There has to be … right?" I'm also confused. I decided that I didn't have the right kind of information to understand what was happening in the Federal government a long time ago, and I still think that, but I find this whole situation very puzzling, because it doesn't make much sense given how I think the world works (which is, of course, a deeply flawed and nearly useless model of the real world).

vvanders 9y ago
I think if you view this through the lens of identity politics it makes a bit more sense why you're seeing such an attack on education and universities. When climate denial and the rejection of basic science is one of the pillars of the party then this is a logical extension.
- x0x0 9y ago
  This is the point of the tax bill: to punish blue states and the educated. The removal of state income tax deductions; the cutting of mortgage interest deductions; and the removal of the graduate school tax break all point the same direction. As for Scott's suggestion that maybe universities can not charge, I can't possibly see that flying with the IRS. If the students still get that valuable education, taking something that used to cost $30k or more, declaring it "free" while still delivering the thing, and telling the irs that therefore, tada! no taxes are due! is... very unlikely to work. What we have is the removal of a specific tax break aimed at graduate school education in order to punish the educated.
  - plandis 9y ago
    That’s probably not the purpose of the tax bill for anyone voting on it. That’s being said I’m sure that some representatives/senators get a kick out of harming people from democratic (“blue”) states.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Funny how quickly even a vaguely political comment by the OP (mentioning "identity politics") descends into the worst kind of political tribalism. Sadly we can't have even marginally political posts on HN anymore because of this. US politics is currently too cancerous and toxic (as tends to happen cyclically) to have rational, well thought-out back-and-forths on topics without it descending into generalizations and attacking caricatures of "the other team".
  - leereeves 9y ago
    None of these changes punishes anyone. Each of these changes removes some form of favoritism. Right now, people in states with high tax rates, people with mortgages, and graduate students pay lower federal tax rates than other people who don't share those favored statuses. One could more credibly argue that the current system punishes people who don't receive these tax breaks. (Graduate students are favored if you count free tuition as compensation in the same way benefits like cars or apartments given to employees by other employers count as taxable compensation.)
    - mnm1 9y ago
      Yes, it's such a favored status to pay more than ten percent of your income to state taxes. People are literally stomping over each other to move to places where their state taxes are the highest, not wanting others to get there first and pay more taxes than they do. These people are clearly, incredibly privileged to have the honor to pay such high state taxes. What favoritism. In the meantime people in states with no taxes are furious. "Why don't we get to pay high taxes?" they cry. We are not favored. The money in their bank accounts is filling up their accounts and they're worried they might not get FDIC protections on all the vast sums of money they accumulated by not being favored by the law. "Such favoritism," they scream. Certainly, the only solution is to make those favored even more favored by raising their taxes even more. Somehow this, in the mind of the unfavored, those poor souls not allowed to pay state taxes, might magically fix things. Clearly no-one has thought anything out really. What favoritism indeed ...
- orangecat 9y ago
  I think if you view this through the lens of identity politics it makes a bit more sense why you're seeing such an attack on education and universities. That's true, and when non-progressives are regularly called Nazis, threatened, and assaulted on campuses I can't blame the right too much for wanting to stick it to them. When climate denial and the rejection of basic science is one of the pillars of the party then this is a logical extension. Basic science like the relative safety of nuclear power and GMOs? The left is just as happy as the right to ignore the scientific consensus when it conflicts with their ideology. Specifically on climate change, if the left had been willing to focus on actually solving the problem we probably could have had a revenue-neutral carbon tax by now. Instead they've used it as a vehicle to attack businesses and demand more government control of the economy, and the inevitable result is that it makes the right interpret the question "does human activity cause climate change?" as "are you a socialist hippie?"
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Plenty of leftists favor nuclear power and GMOs. Those issues are not an inherent part of the Democratic Party platform the way climate change denial is an inherent part of the Republican platform. Blaming Democrats for Republican attitudes toward climate change is rich. The recent trend to blame the left for all the bad things done on the right is just hilarious, given how much Republicans talk about “personal responsibility.” No, Democrats aren’t to blame for Republican denial of climate change or support for Donald Trump or anything else like that. Republicans are responsible for the stuff they do.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    > Specifically on climate change, if the left had been willing to focus on actually solving the problem we probably could have had a revenue-neutral carbon tax by now. What the hell? Having a revenue-neutral carbon tax (or cap-and-trade) has been the environmentalist left’s primary goal this whole time. But the economic right is bankrolled by fossil fuel interests (e.g. the Koch brothers) so that is a non-starter. If you were going to criticize the left for rejecting basic science, the whole “nature vs. nurture” controversy would be a much better example. The notion that little boys and girls are exactly the same before we socialize them with gender roles is a political dogma that doesn’t hold up against the science.
- jknoepfler 9y ago
  So, in my dim view of the world, identity politics usually serve an ulterior motive. Climate denial serves the short term interests of coal, oil, energy, the automotive industry, airlines, you name it. All of those industries I expect to oppose this measure, unless there's a cynical effort to try to give industry more leverage over graduate programs by sponsoring students (loan forgiveness in return for work). At the federal level I think of identity politics as mostly garbage used to spin things cooked up by lobbyists, but maybe this congress is actually playing that game in earnest... Which is really terrifying, because those identities are bonkers.
sliverstorm 9y ago
Marginalizing education is good for anybody selling a story that denies the science & knowledge of the day.
pjc50 9y ago
Downthread you have "corporateguy5" giving the rightwing angle: universities, and indeed knowledge in general, are percieved as "leftist". The republicans voted on the bill without reading it, as has become common.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
indubitable 9y ago
Educational attainment is vastly higher than it's ever been in our entire history. Here [1] are some interesting data from Wiki. Today of Americans 25+, 59% have at least some college, 42% have some degree -- 32% with at least a bachelor's. And nearly 1 in 8 people have a postgraduate/professional degree! If anything, an increasingly major issue today is 'degree inflation.' Ever more jobs that have no real necessity of college graduates are requiring degrees nonetheless presumably because there are now plenty of university educated individuals willing to fill low skill and generally low wage roles. But this action is really hurting the middle class and the efficiency of the US job market. The decision also comes with a number of paradoxically negative consequences for employers. The term I'm using, degree inflation, is borrowed from an extremely informative paper from the Harvard Business School on this exact topic: http://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dismissed-by-degrees.pdf http://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dis... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

vvanders 9y ago

I think if you view this through the lens of identity politics it makes a bit more sense why you're seeing such an attack on education and universities. When climate denial and the rejection of basic science is one of the pillars of the party then this is a logical extension.

x0x0 9y ago
This is the point of the tax bill: to punish blue states and the educated. The removal of state income tax deductions; the cutting of mortgage interest deductions; and the removal of the graduate school tax break all point the same direction. As for Scott's suggestion that maybe universities can not charge, I can't possibly see that flying with the IRS. If the students still get that valuable education, taking something that used to cost $30k or more, declaring it "free" while still delivering the thing, and telling the irs that therefore, tada! no taxes are due! is... very unlikely to work. What we have is the removal of a specific tax break aimed at graduate school education in order to punish the educated.
- plandis 9y ago
  That’s probably not the purpose of the tax bill for anyone voting on it. That’s being said I’m sure that some representatives/senators get a kick out of harming people from democratic (“blue”) states.
- dmix 9y ago
  Funny how quickly even a vaguely political comment by the OP (mentioning "identity politics") descends into the worst kind of political tribalism. Sadly we can't have even marginally political posts on HN anymore because of this. US politics is currently too cancerous and toxic (as tends to happen cyclically) to have rational, well thought-out back-and-forths on topics without it descending into generalizations and attacking caricatures of "the other team".
- leereeves 9y ago
  None of these changes punishes anyone. Each of these changes removes some form of favoritism. Right now, people in states with high tax rates, people with mortgages, and graduate students pay lower federal tax rates than other people who don't share those favored statuses. One could more credibly argue that the current system punishes people who don't receive these tax breaks. (Graduate students are favored if you count free tuition as compensation in the same way benefits like cars or apartments given to employees by other employers count as taxable compensation.)
  - mnm1 9y ago
    Yes, it's such a favored status to pay more than ten percent of your income to state taxes. People are literally stomping over each other to move to places where their state taxes are the highest, not wanting others to get there first and pay more taxes than they do. These people are clearly, incredibly privileged to have the honor to pay such high state taxes. What favoritism. In the meantime people in states with no taxes are furious. "Why don't we get to pay high taxes?" they cry. We are not favored. The money in their bank accounts is filling up their accounts and they're worried they might not get FDIC protections on all the vast sums of money they accumulated by not being favored by the law. "Such favoritism," they scream. Certainly, the only solution is to make those favored even more favored by raising their taxes even more. Somehow this, in the mind of the unfavored, those poor souls not allowed to pay state taxes, might magically fix things. Clearly no-one has thought anything out really. What favoritism indeed ...
orangecat 9y ago
I think if you view this through the lens of identity politics it makes a bit more sense why you're seeing such an attack on education and universities. That's true, and when non-progressives are regularly called Nazis, threatened, and assaulted on campuses I can't blame the right too much for wanting to stick it to them. When climate denial and the rejection of basic science is one of the pillars of the party then this is a logical extension. Basic science like the relative safety of nuclear power and GMOs? The left is just as happy as the right to ignore the scientific consensus when it conflicts with their ideology. Specifically on climate change, if the left had been willing to focus on actually solving the problem we probably could have had a revenue-neutral carbon tax by now. Instead they've used it as a vehicle to attack businesses and demand more government control of the economy, and the inevitable result is that it makes the right interpret the question "does human activity cause climate change?" as "are you a socialist hippie?"
- mikeash 9y ago
  Plenty of leftists favor nuclear power and GMOs. Those issues are not an inherent part of the Democratic Party platform the way climate change denial is an inherent part of the Republican platform. Blaming Democrats for Republican attitudes toward climate change is rich. The recent trend to blame the left for all the bad things done on the right is just hilarious, given how much Republicans talk about “personal responsibility.” No, Democrats aren’t to blame for Republican denial of climate change or support for Donald Trump or anything else like that. Republicans are responsible for the stuff they do.
- philwelch 9y ago
  > Specifically on climate change, if the left had been willing to focus on actually solving the problem we probably could have had a revenue-neutral carbon tax by now. What the hell? Having a revenue-neutral carbon tax (or cap-and-trade) has been the environmentalist left’s primary goal this whole time. But the economic right is bankrolled by fossil fuel interests (e.g. the Koch brothers) so that is a non-starter. If you were going to criticize the left for rejecting basic science, the whole “nature vs. nurture” controversy would be a much better example. The notion that little boys and girls are exactly the same before we socialize them with gender roles is a political dogma that doesn’t hold up against the science.
jknoepfler 9y ago
So, in my dim view of the world, identity politics usually serve an ulterior motive. Climate denial serves the short term interests of coal, oil, energy, the automotive industry, airlines, you name it. All of those industries I expect to oppose this measure, unless there's a cynical effort to try to give industry more leverage over graduate programs by sponsoring students (loan forgiveness in return for work). At the federal level I think of identity politics as mostly garbage used to spin things cooked up by lobbyists, but maybe this congress is actually playing that game in earnest... Which is really terrifying, because those identities are bonkers.

sliverstorm 9y ago

Marginalizing education is good for anybody selling a story that denies the science & knowledge of the day.

pjc50 9y ago

Downthread you have "corporateguy5" giving the rightwing angle: universities, and indeed knowledge in general, are percieved as "leftist". The republicans voted on the bill without reading it, as has become common.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

indubitable 9y ago

Educational attainment is vastly higher than it's ever been in our entire history. Here [1] are some interesting data from Wiki. Today of Americans 25+, 59% have at least some college, 42% have some degree -- 32% with at least a bachelor's. And nearly 1 in 8 people have a postgraduate/professional degree! If anything, an increasingly major issue today is 'degree inflation.' Ever more jobs that have no real necessity of college graduates are requiring degrees nonetheless presumably because there are now plenty of university educated individuals willing to fill low skill and generally low wage roles. But this action is really hurting the middle class and the efficiency of the US job market. The decision also comes with a number of paradoxically negative consequences for employers. The term I'm using, degree inflation, is borrowed from an extremely informative paper from the Harvard Business School on this exact topic: http://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dismissed-by-degrees.pdf http://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dis... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...