12 ms·

I agree. Old school leftists were smart enough to understand that being rich is the ultimate privilege, nothing else comes close. Help the poor, and you will al

I agree. Old school leftists were smart enough to understand that being rich is the ultimate privilege, nothing else comes close. Help the poor, and you will also help minorities which are poor due to historical racism, slavery and so on. Help people based on their skin colour/ethnicity, and you'll unnecessarily make all the poor, unprivileged people not included very bitter, increasing political divisions, racism and people like Donald Trump voted into the office. It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. I don't see any reason why European style model couldn't work well also in the US.

jandrewrogers 3y ago
> It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. The US already does this. Taxation is more progressive than Europe and large amounts of money are redistributed to poor and troubled schools, in some cases as much as twice the European average. It is not correlated with any of the outcomes you are imagining. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. The US has been doing that for decades with nothing to show for it.
- NalNezumi 3y ago
  Can you cite a source for the statement in second paragraph? I'm not from the states, but to my limited understanding, funding for school comes primarily from district and state level and in the form of property tax. Meaning rich areas have enormous advantage. Meanwhile the federal proportion of the funding for a school is less than 10% [1] [1] https://youtu.be/VZx-rLoV4do https://youtu.be/VZx-rLoV4do timestamp 3:00
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    Which wealth class do you reckon pays more property taxes?
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Why do property taxes need to fund the school / why does wealth class dictate the quality of schooling you’re entitled to? Shouldn’t we give the best schooling to the students that will take the most advantage of it / get the most benefit out of it? There’s all sorts of stories about how privilege at birth gets you into all sorts of elite places through a mix of wealth (bribes) and connections. Yet true expertise in more objective fields (eg STEM) does not reward those as easily. Look at Ontario, Canada [1]. There’s an equal funding formula out of the general pool of funds for the province largely based on how many students are in your school board. The Toronto School Board (and I imagine other school boards too) then distribute their funds similarly [2]. School fundings isn’t tied to property taxes and it’s fundamentally weird to tie anything to property taxes as it gives back in services more to those areas that are already advantaged and creates skewed voting incentives. I’m not saying that education in Canada was perfect, but I found the public school system to be decent enough with lots of opportunity to excel regardless and generally an equalizer (home dynamics it can’t correct for and is a huge problem). For example, I went to a well-regarded STEM magnate program that had objective entrance requirements that I had to travel to embedded within the public school. Out of two I got into, I ended up picking one closer because it was more convenient for my mom even though the other one I got into was a bit better regarded / and somehow had better funding (maybe more students but I suspect also outside funding drives / donations). This travel problem repeats all the time with charter schools and is my main problem with the idea - when you’re wealthy travel is less of a problem (eg you have a very flexible work schedule). [1] https://peopleforeducation.ca/public-education-in-ontario/how-education-is-funded/ https://peopleforeducation.ca/public-education-in-ontario/ho... [2] https://www.tdsb.on.ca/About-Us/Business-Services/Budgets-and-Financial-Statements/School-Budget-Allocations https://www.tdsb.on.ca/About-Us/Business-Services/Budgets-an...
    - xyzzyz 3y ago
      It doesn’t really matter how much tax is paid by “the rich” (say, top 1 in 1000), because collectively, they make too little money to make much of a difference even if we taxed 100% of their income. What does matter is taxation on top 20% of population, and they do pay a lot of money on property taxes.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Yeah that’s my understanding of the situation. Additionally, politically governmental funding of schools stagnates while richer areas use funding drives to make up for it (in addition to the difference in property taxes already making a huge difference). Additionally, when the wealthy live in an area without the aggregate property taxes covering the school costs (eg because local governments slash funding anyway) they send their kids to private schools. To improve outcomes you need a unified school district and limit the existence of private schools. Charter schools are positioned as “choice” but quality schools will remain out of reach of people using the vouchers to try to get to a better school - transportation is the first hurdle and as soon as meaningful number of “poors” move in, the wealthy will abandon the public schools and move to private institutions with entrance requirements that try to filter out the less wealthy masses.
    - charrondev 3y ago
      Is there a part of the world you could point to that banned private schools altogether and saw better aggregate outcomes? Because if we’re just guessing, I would guess elimination of private schools would result in rich people with children grouping up in very wealthy areas more than they do today. A public school in a very affluent and wealthy area would likely not have many “pools” attending (because the cost of living in the area is so high). One other type of charter school to consider would be one’s specialized is students with various disadvantages such as charter schools specialized in blind, deaf, autistic or emotionally disturbed students. This 2018 analysis by the NCSECS (national center for special education) found that there were 137 such specialized schools and many were primarily focused on students with 1 specific disability. These schools had high enrolling rates for such students and found they had lower rates of suspension and expulsion. The recommendation was additional funding for such schools. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604731.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604731.pdf
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        If the public schools are good, the rich send to private schools for the exclusionary aspect more than for education outcomes so it doesn't really matter. I mean it matters in the sense that less talented people take up the spots for talented people, but not in terms of generating talent out of the general populace. > Because if we’re just guessing, I would guess elimination of private schools would result in rich people with children grouping up in very wealthy areas more than they do today. A public school in a very affluent and wealthy area would likely not have many “pools” attending (because the cost of living in the area is so high). But that's the point. If the funding is uniform based on number of pupils, in fact affluent areas will have worse education because they'll have fewer students. The thing that's hard to fight is "funding drives" to buy things for the school. That's the other thing affluent areas do on top of having a higher baseline of funding due to property taxes. > This 2018 analysis by the NCSECS (national center for special education) found that there were 137 such specialized schools and many were primarily focused on students with 1 specific disability. These schools had high enrolling rates for such students and found they had lower rates of suspension and expulsion. The recommendation was additional funding for such schools. That is correct. Ontario has additional funding for special education programs for those with disabilities on top of the normal funding per pupil
  - hajile 3y ago
    This you get the argument for child tax credits. Let the money follow the child instead of the school. In my area, private schools routinely offer much better education at a fraction of the expenditure per child. Loads of money simply disappears into the corruption of the school system, but private schools know doing that means students will leave and they’ll go bankrupt. Set a national number and stick with it (allowing states to add to that number to account for their own higher cost of living). At that point, schools will have to compete on offering a good education instead of being the local monopoly you are forced into using. It also offers smart kids born into bad school districts a way out of the cycle of poverty. Politically, it’s weird too. This policy is fundamentally socialist redistribution, but is embraced by the right while being decried as evil by the left.
    - eru 3y ago
      > Set a national number and stick with it (allowing states to add to that number to account for their own higher cost of living). Why do you even need to set a national number? Let states or even counties decide for themselves. (Make transfers to poor counties, if necessary. But don't tell them how to use the money.)
      - hajile 3y ago
        That’s what I said, but from the other end. I started with fixed Federal subsidies (which actually transfers money from wealthy states to poor states) then individual states can optionally set higher limits by adding their own money too.
        eru 3y ago
        I'm saying that federal subsidies for poor states should not be earmarked for specific projects like education. There's no reason to involve the federal level more than necessary. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
        hajile 3y ago
  - xyzzyz 3y ago
    This federal 10%, along with state level funding, is typically used to level the funding across the districts. The equalization of per student spending in school districts across the country has largely already happened, with little to show for it in terms of improvement of low performing schools. Rich districts do have more local school funding than poor districts, but this difference is made up with state and federal funds. There is extreme scarcity of evidence for the idea that giving more money to schools improve outcomes of students. It simply doesn’t work this way. The worst performing schools in many US cities already have very high levels of funding with little to show it, for example in Washington DC. At the same time, quasi-experimental settings like Zuckerberg dropping $100M on Newark schools have basically zero effect in terms of student outcomes.
    - Loquebantur 3y ago
      Kids don't actually learn much curriculum content (as opposed to social behavior) when at school. They do that when at home. Poor kids' homes aren't conducive to learning. They lack the necessary materials, (undisturbed) space and time. Necessary social support for content learning is often absent. Wondering about why money given to schools (used for the most part for administrative nonsense presumably) doesn't change outcomes much consequently appears to show a (class based?) detachment from respective realities?
  - eru 3y ago
    See eg https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is... > This has all had the unfortunate effect of deepening ignorance about American school spending. We know, for example, that majority-Black and Hispanic schools receive significantly more per-pupil funding than majority-white schools. This fact is so contrary to basic liberal assumptions that they often react angrily to hearing it. But this reality shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, we’ve been shoveling money at the racial achievement gap for 40 years, to no avail. Part of the problem here is an assumption that public education is dominantly funded by local expenditure, which hasn’t been true for some time. In fact, state funding is at or near parity with local spending in the United States, and state funding is heavily tilted towards areas of perceived need (that is, failing schools or districts). Federal funding, including but hardly limited to Title I funding, is also dominantly directed towards poor or high-minority schools. The rising tide of think tank and foundation money that finds its way into public K-12 school is very hard to track, but we can safely assume that almost all of it is earmarked for the poorest students. We’ve been trying to spend our way our of this problem since before I was born! And yet people who should know better pretend not to understand this reality and repeat the complaint about local funding of public schools, despite the fact that that story is not true.
    - enkid 3y ago
      This guys argument is based on a meta-analysis which has nothing at all to do with the argument he is making. The meta analysis in question (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED610568.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED610568.pdf) is talking about how different research techniques measure data in different ways and therefore can't be easily compared. He then takes a look at this data, determines that it means interventions don't work very well (he doesn't argue they don't work, just that they don't work that well) and therefore concludes that we shouldn't even try to close the gaps in educational outcomes. You can't read a study and completely change it's meaning, especially since the study he cites is from researches that clearly believe evidence based educational intervention can work. In other words, the people who the author cites, who looked at the data more closely then the author hold opposite beliefs from the author.
- megaman821 3y ago
  Any large increase in the social programs of the US is going to have to tied to increased tax on the middle class. The tax-the-rich and spend politicians seem disingenuous by not telling their constituents what it would actually take to fund large social programs. That dishonestly guarantees those social programs will never come to fruition, so do they even want them?
hackernewds 3y ago
> European style model couldn't work well also in the US. If you lived here, you would find that European style models barely work in Europe
- eru 3y ago
  Europe is a diverse place. It's hard to call both Greece and Estonia a 'European style model'.
hajile 3y ago
I’ve come to the conclusion that progressive taxes do the opposite of their intent. Looks at tax revenue vs GDP. No matter the tax rates, the percentage stays the same (fluctuations within a couple points) regardless of official tax rates. When you increase taxes on the wealthy, they don’t pay more. They either pay for loopholes to be created or they reduce/stagnate salaries to compensate. Meanwhile, Congress cares more about who pays them than who votes (there’s a reason they argue about superficial stuff and agree about all the worst stuff). When all the taxes get paid by the rich, the poor lose that influence and still wind up making the same amount of money anyway. Universal sales tax is better. If the rich buy more stuff they pay more. There’s no loopholes to be found. You can also provide tax breaks to the poor by reducing or eliminating sales tax on consumer goods which greatly affects the poor, but only marginally affects the rich.
- eru 3y ago
  > Looks at tax revenue vs GDP. No matter the tax rates, the percentage stays the same (fluctuations within a couple points) regardless of official tax rates. That might perhaps be true over time, but it's not true between countries. Eg Singapore has a much lower ratio of tax take to GDP than Germany. > Universal sales tax is better. If the rich buy more stuff they pay more. There’s no loopholes to be found. You can also provide tax breaks to the poor by reducing or eliminating sales tax on consumer goods which greatly affects the poor, but only marginally affects the rich. No need for a dual system, that just adds more loopholes. Just give pool people money, if necessary. If you want an even simpler system, tax land value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax You can't hide land, and it's in fixed supply.
eru 3y ago
> It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. I don't see any reason why European style model couldn't work well also in the US. You realise that almost all of Europe is poorer than the US? Yes, you can make people more equal by making the rich poor as well. But what's the point? Btw, in the US schools in poorer parts already get more funding. That hasn't helped. See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is... > This has all had the unfortunate effect of deepening ignorance about American school spending. We know, for example, that majority-Black and Hispanic schools receive significantly more per-pupil funding than majority-white schools. This fact is so contrary to basic liberal assumptions that they often react angrily to hearing it. But this reality shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, we’ve been shoveling money at the racial achievement gap for 40 years, to no avail. Part of the problem here is an assumption that public education is dominantly funded by local expenditure, which hasn’t been true for some time. In fact, state funding is at or near parity with local spending in the United States, and state funding is heavily tilted towards areas of perceived need (that is, failing schools or districts). Federal funding, including but hardly limited to Title I funding, is also dominantly directed towards poor or high-minority schools. The rising tide of think tank and foundation money that finds its way into public K-12 school is very hard to track, but we can safely assume that almost all of it is earmarked for the poorest students. We’ve been trying to spend our way our of this problem since before I was born! And yet people who should know better pretend not to understand this reality and repeat the complaint about local funding of public schools, despite the fact that that story is not true.
- virtualritz 3y ago
  Someone refuted the point of the substack you posted above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763622
  - eru 3y ago
    See the rest of that discussions. It's not refuted at all.
throwaway6734 3y ago
There's no reason to think that the European style model works in Europe. Most of Europe is facing dire demographic issues.
mbostleman 3y ago
What is your prediction of the efficiency of helping the poor that giving the poor money achieves? I assume from your comment you think it's a positive number? We know that there is a set of people that can't manage money in a sustainable way for themselves. Surely, giving this set of people money produces zero to negative help. But I don't know the make up of all of the "poor" or why they're poor in the first place.
brnaftr361 3y ago
Does that actually follow, though? My own perspective on the matter as someone who sorta bootstrapped from a pretty shitty strating position is: no. If we took a cross section of people doing reasonably well what they've done is complied with society's demands, more succinctly they've served the market. They aren't exceptionally smart, talented, or disciplined, they just selflessly (including moving far and wide) elected a corner of the market that was valuable, and where they were themselves valued. And from my experience: they have really poor spending habits, they have shallow economic and political positions. And this is sort of the paradigmatic flaw with throwing money at people, in a lot of cases they do not have the faculties to comport themselves in such a manner where it is a benefit to themselves nor to their fellows. I fear many of these people, when they're put through some serious adversity, will succeed in recovering themselves. I'm not trying to make an argument which paints me as some superior element to these folks, but rather these are mistakes that I have personally made and lived through while also existing on the precipice of dangerous self-amplifying poverty. To some extent, and with the way that things are structured, I think this very much attends to the "teach a man to fish" logic, and that lending that kind of real, personalized trivium is the way forward. Italy has (or had) such a program: they would disburse pooled funds to a minimum of 3 unemployed individuals who were then expected to use said funds to start a business. To my knowledge many of these were cooperatives, which I think is an ingenious way of remediating some of the more egregious issues which we see bubbling up in our day-to-day lives in the US. Now, I won't discount the fact that having a decent starting position is a huge boon; the crux of my argument here is that modifying it without respect to the nuance, as I've seen it, can lead to even worse outcomes. And I think the quasi-exclusive programs also nucleate certain perspectives, culture, and communities which themselves can be pretty detrimental. For instance I grew up in trailer parks, I have some aspects of white trash that I very deliberately maintain to my own detriment because it is part of my identity and a mark of pride, and sequestration of those habits makes me legitimately uncomfortable. Also don't bother comparing the US and Europe, the latter without the former has historically been very volatile and I don't believe there's any reason to expect that things will have changed. As to why that matters: the US must have certain integral aspects both socially and politically which favor its position as the "world peacekeeping force" (read: world police), including egregious spending on "defense". And this is apparently perceived at large as justified. Moreover, military participation is also quite high, in part because of the way that America at large is structured. It is very much a multifaceted incentive complex. And I think that, over the years, it has very much seated America as the lynchpin of the globalized system. Personally, I don't like it, but I very much anticipate the effacement of America's current position as a global leader is going to lead to a very traumatic shift in the way of the world as we know it. The US is itself structured in a completely different way than is Europe as well, with considerable contrasts in needs and wants in comparison to Europe and in contrast with our own many, varied, and multifaceted communities. Rural America is not urban America. Also, I think with (real) progressive policies the socioeconomic rules shift, and those shifts tend to make realizing even a modicum of wealth even more difficult in a lot of cases. For instance the big money print over COVID has destroyed a pretty considerable amount of my savings, and the Biden administration pushing for student loan forgiveness - I could've taken loans, shaved many years off of my opportunity cost, and have saved substantially less money to exit my university program with no debt burden, and I wouldn't have to suffer post-COVID university experience. Instead, assuming it was to be passed, I would be out $10k and I will have paid substantially more than previously predicted given the Feds 2% mandate, in addition to the huge shuffling of staff, policies, and the experience all due to policy changes. To the best of my knowledge, I have elected classical fiscal policy, and lost at every turn while trying to drag myself upwards but it was the paradigmatic road to success that I tried to pave.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jandrewrogers 3y ago

> It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. The US already does this. Taxation is more progressive than Europe and large amounts of money are redistributed to poor and troubled schools, in some cases as much as twice the European average. It is not correlated with any of the outcomes you are imagining. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. The US has been doing that for decades with nothing to show for it.

NalNezumi 3y ago
Can you cite a source for the statement in second paragraph? I'm not from the states, but to my limited understanding, funding for school comes primarily from district and state level and in the form of property tax. Meaning rich areas have enormous advantage. Meanwhile the federal proportion of the funding for a school is less than 10% [1] [1] https://youtu.be/VZx-rLoV4do https://youtu.be/VZx-rLoV4do timestamp 3:00
- hackernewds 3y ago
  Which wealth class do you reckon pays more property taxes?
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Why do property taxes need to fund the school / why does wealth class dictate the quality of schooling you’re entitled to? Shouldn’t we give the best schooling to the students that will take the most advantage of it / get the most benefit out of it? There’s all sorts of stories about how privilege at birth gets you into all sorts of elite places through a mix of wealth (bribes) and connections. Yet true expertise in more objective fields (eg STEM) does not reward those as easily. Look at Ontario, Canada [1]. There’s an equal funding formula out of the general pool of funds for the province largely based on how many students are in your school board. The Toronto School Board (and I imagine other school boards too) then distribute their funds similarly [2]. School fundings isn’t tied to property taxes and it’s fundamentally weird to tie anything to property taxes as it gives back in services more to those areas that are already advantaged and creates skewed voting incentives. I’m not saying that education in Canada was perfect, but I found the public school system to be decent enough with lots of opportunity to excel regardless and generally an equalizer (home dynamics it can’t correct for and is a huge problem). For example, I went to a well-regarded STEM magnate program that had objective entrance requirements that I had to travel to embedded within the public school. Out of two I got into, I ended up picking one closer because it was more convenient for my mom even though the other one I got into was a bit better regarded / and somehow had better funding (maybe more students but I suspect also outside funding drives / donations). This travel problem repeats all the time with charter schools and is my main problem with the idea - when you’re wealthy travel is less of a problem (eg you have a very flexible work schedule). [1] https://peopleforeducation.ca/public-education-in-ontario/how-education-is-funded/ https://peopleforeducation.ca/public-education-in-ontario/ho... [2] https://www.tdsb.on.ca/About-Us/Business-Services/Budgets-and-Financial-Statements/School-Budget-Allocations https://www.tdsb.on.ca/About-Us/Business-Services/Budgets-an...
  - xyzzyz 3y ago
    It doesn’t really matter how much tax is paid by “the rich” (say, top 1 in 1000), because collectively, they make too little money to make much of a difference even if we taxed 100% of their income. What does matter is taxation on top 20% of population, and they do pay a lot of money on property taxes.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Yeah that’s my understanding of the situation. Additionally, politically governmental funding of schools stagnates while richer areas use funding drives to make up for it (in addition to the difference in property taxes already making a huge difference). Additionally, when the wealthy live in an area without the aggregate property taxes covering the school costs (eg because local governments slash funding anyway) they send their kids to private schools. To improve outcomes you need a unified school district and limit the existence of private schools. Charter schools are positioned as “choice” but quality schools will remain out of reach of people using the vouchers to try to get to a better school - transportation is the first hurdle and as soon as meaningful number of “poors” move in, the wealthy will abandon the public schools and move to private institutions with entrance requirements that try to filter out the less wealthy masses.
  - charrondev 3y ago
    Is there a part of the world you could point to that banned private schools altogether and saw better aggregate outcomes? Because if we’re just guessing, I would guess elimination of private schools would result in rich people with children grouping up in very wealthy areas more than they do today. A public school in a very affluent and wealthy area would likely not have many “pools” attending (because the cost of living in the area is so high). One other type of charter school to consider would be one’s specialized is students with various disadvantages such as charter schools specialized in blind, deaf, autistic or emotionally disturbed students. This 2018 analysis by the NCSECS (national center for special education) found that there were 137 such specialized schools and many were primarily focused on students with 1 specific disability. These schools had high enrolling rates for such students and found they had lower rates of suspension and expulsion. The recommendation was additional funding for such schools. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604731.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604731.pdf
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      If the public schools are good, the rich send to private schools for the exclusionary aspect more than for education outcomes so it doesn't really matter. I mean it matters in the sense that less talented people take up the spots for talented people, but not in terms of generating talent out of the general populace. > Because if we’re just guessing, I would guess elimination of private schools would result in rich people with children grouping up in very wealthy areas more than they do today. A public school in a very affluent and wealthy area would likely not have many “pools” attending (because the cost of living in the area is so high). But that's the point. If the funding is uniform based on number of pupils, in fact affluent areas will have worse education because they'll have fewer students. The thing that's hard to fight is "funding drives" to buy things for the school. That's the other thing affluent areas do on top of having a higher baseline of funding due to property taxes. > This 2018 analysis by the NCSECS (national center for special education) found that there were 137 such specialized schools and many were primarily focused on students with 1 specific disability. These schools had high enrolling rates for such students and found they had lower rates of suspension and expulsion. The recommendation was additional funding for such schools. That is correct. Ontario has additional funding for special education programs for those with disabilities on top of the normal funding per pupil
- hajile 3y ago
  This you get the argument for child tax credits. Let the money follow the child instead of the school. In my area, private schools routinely offer much better education at a fraction of the expenditure per child. Loads of money simply disappears into the corruption of the school system, but private schools know doing that means students will leave and they’ll go bankrupt. Set a national number and stick with it (allowing states to add to that number to account for their own higher cost of living). At that point, schools will have to compete on offering a good education instead of being the local monopoly you are forced into using. It also offers smart kids born into bad school districts a way out of the cycle of poverty. Politically, it’s weird too. This policy is fundamentally socialist redistribution, but is embraced by the right while being decried as evil by the left.
  - eru 3y ago
    > Set a national number and stick with it (allowing states to add to that number to account for their own higher cost of living). Why do you even need to set a national number? Let states or even counties decide for themselves. (Make transfers to poor counties, if necessary. But don't tell them how to use the money.)
    - hajile 3y ago
      That’s what I said, but from the other end. I started with fixed Federal subsidies (which actually transfers money from wealthy states to poor states) then individual states can optionally set higher limits by adding their own money too.
      - eru 3y ago
        I'm saying that federal subsidies for poor states should not be earmarked for specific projects like education. There's no reason to involve the federal level more than necessary. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
        hajile 3y ago
- xyzzyz 3y ago
  This federal 10%, along with state level funding, is typically used to level the funding across the districts. The equalization of per student spending in school districts across the country has largely already happened, with little to show for it in terms of improvement of low performing schools. Rich districts do have more local school funding than poor districts, but this difference is made up with state and federal funds. There is extreme scarcity of evidence for the idea that giving more money to schools improve outcomes of students. It simply doesn’t work this way. The worst performing schools in many US cities already have very high levels of funding with little to show it, for example in Washington DC. At the same time, quasi-experimental settings like Zuckerberg dropping $100M on Newark schools have basically zero effect in terms of student outcomes.
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
    Kids don't actually learn much curriculum content (as opposed to social behavior) when at school. They do that when at home. Poor kids' homes aren't conducive to learning. They lack the necessary materials, (undisturbed) space and time. Necessary social support for content learning is often absent. Wondering about why money given to schools (used for the most part for administrative nonsense presumably) doesn't change outcomes much consequently appears to show a (class based?) detachment from respective realities?
- eru 3y ago
  See eg https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is... > This has all had the unfortunate effect of deepening ignorance about American school spending. We know, for example, that majority-Black and Hispanic schools receive significantly more per-pupil funding than majority-white schools. This fact is so contrary to basic liberal assumptions that they often react angrily to hearing it. But this reality shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, we’ve been shoveling money at the racial achievement gap for 40 years, to no avail. Part of the problem here is an assumption that public education is dominantly funded by local expenditure, which hasn’t been true for some time. In fact, state funding is at or near parity with local spending in the United States, and state funding is heavily tilted towards areas of perceived need (that is, failing schools or districts). Federal funding, including but hardly limited to Title I funding, is also dominantly directed towards poor or high-minority schools. The rising tide of think tank and foundation money that finds its way into public K-12 school is very hard to track, but we can safely assume that almost all of it is earmarked for the poorest students. We’ve been trying to spend our way our of this problem since before I was born! And yet people who should know better pretend not to understand this reality and repeat the complaint about local funding of public schools, despite the fact that that story is not true.
  - enkid 3y ago
    This guys argument is based on a meta-analysis which has nothing at all to do with the argument he is making. The meta analysis in question (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED610568.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED610568.pdf) is talking about how different research techniques measure data in different ways and therefore can't be easily compared. He then takes a look at this data, determines that it means interventions don't work very well (he doesn't argue they don't work, just that they don't work that well) and therefore concludes that we shouldn't even try to close the gaps in educational outcomes. You can't read a study and completely change it's meaning, especially since the study he cites is from researches that clearly believe evidence based educational intervention can work. In other words, the people who the author cites, who looked at the data more closely then the author hold opposite beliefs from the author.
megaman821 3y ago
Any large increase in the social programs of the US is going to have to tied to increased tax on the middle class. The tax-the-rich and spend politicians seem disingenuous by not telling their constituents what it would actually take to fund large social programs. That dishonestly guarantees those social programs will never come to fruition, so do they even want them?

hackernewds 3y ago

> European style model couldn't work well also in the US. If you lived here, you would find that European style models barely work in Europe

eru 3y ago
Europe is a diverse place. It's hard to call both Greece and Estonia a 'European style model'.

hajile 3y ago

I’ve come to the conclusion that progressive taxes do the opposite of their intent. Looks at tax revenue vs GDP. No matter the tax rates, the percentage stays the same (fluctuations within a couple points) regardless of official tax rates. When you increase taxes on the wealthy, they don’t pay more. They either pay for loopholes to be created or they reduce/stagnate salaries to compensate. Meanwhile, Congress cares more about who pays them than who votes (there’s a reason they argue about superficial stuff and agree about all the worst stuff). When all the taxes get paid by the rich, the poor lose that influence and still wind up making the same amount of money anyway. Universal sales tax is better. If the rich buy more stuff they pay more. There’s no loopholes to be found. You can also provide tax breaks to the poor by reducing or eliminating sales tax on consumer goods which greatly affects the poor, but only marginally affects the rich.

eru 3y ago
> Looks at tax revenue vs GDP. No matter the tax rates, the percentage stays the same (fluctuations within a couple points) regardless of official tax rates. That might perhaps be true over time, but it's not true between countries. Eg Singapore has a much lower ratio of tax take to GDP than Germany. > Universal sales tax is better. If the rich buy more stuff they pay more. There’s no loopholes to be found. You can also provide tax breaks to the poor by reducing or eliminating sales tax on consumer goods which greatly affects the poor, but only marginally affects the rich. No need for a dual system, that just adds more loopholes. Just give pool people money, if necessary. If you want an even simpler system, tax land value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax You can't hide land, and it's in fixed supply.

eru 3y ago

> It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. I don't see any reason why European style model couldn't work well also in the US. You realise that almost all of Europe is poorer than the US? Yes, you can make people more equal by making the rich poor as well. But what's the point? Btw, in the US schools in poorer parts already get more funding. That hasn't helped. See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is... > This has all had the unfortunate effect of deepening ignorance about American school spending. We know, for example, that majority-Black and Hispanic schools receive significantly more per-pupil funding than majority-white schools. This fact is so contrary to basic liberal assumptions that they often react angrily to hearing it. But this reality shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, we’ve been shoveling money at the racial achievement gap for 40 years, to no avail. Part of the problem here is an assumption that public education is dominantly funded by local expenditure, which hasn’t been true for some time. In fact, state funding is at or near parity with local spending in the United States, and state funding is heavily tilted towards areas of perceived need (that is, failing schools or districts). Federal funding, including but hardly limited to Title I funding, is also dominantly directed towards poor or high-minority schools. The rising tide of think tank and foundation money that finds its way into public K-12 school is very hard to track, but we can safely assume that almost all of it is earmarked for the poorest students. We’ve been trying to spend our way our of this problem since before I was born! And yet people who should know better pretend not to understand this reality and repeat the complaint about local funding of public schools, despite the fact that that story is not true.

virtualritz 3y ago
Someone refuted the point of the substack you posted above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35763622
- eru 3y ago
  See the rest of that discussions. It's not refuted at all.

throwaway6734 3y ago

There's no reason to think that the European style model works in Europe. Most of Europe is facing dire demographic issues.

mbostleman 3y ago

What is your prediction of the efficiency of helping the poor that giving the poor money achieves? I assume from your comment you think it's a positive number? We know that there is a set of people that can't manage money in a sustainable way for themselves. Surely, giving this set of people money produces zero to negative help. But I don't know the make up of all of the "poor" or why they're poor in the first place.

brnaftr361 3y ago

Does that actually follow, though? My own perspective on the matter as someone who sorta bootstrapped from a pretty shitty strating position is: no. If we took a cross section of people doing reasonably well what they've done is complied with society's demands, more succinctly they've served the market. They aren't exceptionally smart, talented, or disciplined, they just selflessly (including moving far and wide) elected a corner of the market that was valuable, and where they were themselves valued. And from my experience: they have really poor spending habits, they have shallow economic and political positions. And this is sort of the paradigmatic flaw with throwing money at people, in a lot of cases they do not have the faculties to comport themselves in such a manner where it is a benefit to themselves nor to their fellows. I fear many of these people, when they're put through some serious adversity, will succeed in recovering themselves. I'm not trying to make an argument which paints me as some superior element to these folks, but rather these are mistakes that I have personally made and lived through while also existing on the precipice of dangerous self-amplifying poverty. To some extent, and with the way that things are structured, I think this very much attends to the "teach a man to fish" logic, and that lending that kind of real, personalized trivium is the way forward. Italy has (or had) such a program: they would disburse pooled funds to a minimum of 3 unemployed individuals who were then expected to use said funds to start a business. To my knowledge many of these were cooperatives, which I think is an ingenious way of remediating some of the more egregious issues which we see bubbling up in our day-to-day lives in the US. Now, I won't discount the fact that having a decent starting position is a huge boon; the crux of my argument here is that modifying it without respect to the nuance, as I've seen it, can lead to even worse outcomes. And I think the quasi-exclusive programs also nucleate certain perspectives, culture, and communities which themselves can be pretty detrimental. For instance I grew up in trailer parks, I have some aspects of white trash that I very deliberately maintain to my own detriment because it is part of my identity and a mark of pride, and sequestration of those habits makes me legitimately uncomfortable. Also don't bother comparing the US and Europe, the latter without the former has historically been very volatile and I don't believe there's any reason to expect that things will have changed. As to why that matters: the US must have certain integral aspects both socially and politically which favor its position as the "world peacekeeping force" (read: world police), including egregious spending on "defense". And this is apparently perceived at large as justified. Moreover, military participation is also quite high, in part because of the way that America at large is structured. It is very much a multifaceted incentive complex. And I think that, over the years, it has very much seated America as the lynchpin of the globalized system. Personally, I don't like it, but I very much anticipate the effacement of America's current position as a global leader is going to lead to a very traumatic shift in the way of the world as we know it. The US is itself structured in a completely different way than is Europe as well, with considerable contrasts in needs and wants in comparison to Europe and in contrast with our own many, varied, and multifaceted communities. Rural America is not urban America. Also, I think with (real) progressive policies the socioeconomic rules shift, and those shifts tend to make realizing even a modicum of wealth even more difficult in a lot of cases. For instance the big money print over COVID has destroyed a pretty considerable amount of my savings, and the Biden administration pushing for student loan forgiveness - I could've taken loans, shaved many years off of my opportunity cost, and have saved substantially less money to exit my university program with no debt burden, and I wouldn't have to suffer post-COVID university experience. Instead, assuming it was to be passed, I would be out $10k and I will have paid substantially more than previously predicted given the Feds 2% mandate, in addition to the huge shuffling of staff, policies, and the experience all due to policy changes. To the best of my knowledge, I have elected classical fiscal policy, and lost at every turn while trying to drag myself upwards but it was the paradigmatic road to success that I tried to pave.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]